Hoarding used to be a good word. It meant squirrels and their nuts and long winters and boy, weren’t those squirrels mighty smart?!
What'd I do?!
I always thought that neat and tidy houses were a New-England thing… some kind of puritanical exorcism of dust. As a child, I never held a feather duster, we just wiped everything down with a ‘basahan’ (wet wash cloth). I thought only french maids used feather dusters and only to tease penises that were naughty.
ooh la la! Let me clean that for you!
Nonetheless, I always found neat houses to be the products of some hidden El Salvadorean maid who only came out when I wasn’t looking OR neat houses were under the dictatorship of an OCD mother who needed the house to look like a sterile pic from House Beautiful.
I'm afraid to release dead skin cells here. I might get arrested.
I will let you into a family secret: we hoard.
Now we’re not like the show Hoarders and have 7 cats and 60 years of daily newspapers lining the way to the kitchen stove.
We make regular use of the trash can every week and my mom is meticulous about keeping the kitchen spotless and the bedroom sheets always have hospital folds. But you see, we hoard with a PURPOSE!
We have one room in the entire house where it’s my mom’s personal domain. In it, she has cans of corned beef and Spam, packets of hot cocoa, and clothes dating back to when she first immigrated to the U.S. In this room, I know she has 7 identical leather jackets “cuz they were on sale” that she will never wear. In this room is a gigantic human-sized stuffed white bear my college boyfriend won for me at Circus Circus when on a road trip to Reno. In this room, there are palettes of Top Ramen and bags of new socks.
Inside the room-that-shall-not-be-named...
You see, any time in my life when I didn’t want anything anymore, or I found it old and nearing the end of its life; my mom would snatch it from me and look at me with a bit of disdain at my obvious throw-away-disposable-the-world-is-my-oyster American view of the world. She would then definitively say, “We’ll send it to the Philippines,” and that item would disappear into the room-that-must-not-be-named.
So yes, we hoard. When there’s a sale -especially at Ross or Costco- we buy 3-7 items more “for the Philippines”. Whenever canned goods are 4 for a dollar, we buy 20 “for the Philippines”. Most of all, if any family member throws out their jeans or Nike sportswear (which is funny since the Nike factories are in the Philippines but the filipinos can’t seem to afford it), we collect them “for the Philippines”.
I honestly can say I’ve never had a garage sale with my family. Old furniture gets given to the ‘kids’ (meaning me and my generation trying to fill our new apartments and homes) and old clothes are saved for the next generation (meaning me and my cousin’s kids… yeah, they’re wearing duds from the 1970′s… it’s called VINTAGE! Who’s stylin’ now?!)… that’s just the way it was.
I used to be embarrassed by my family because it wasn’t ‘American’. Americans have garage sales and have maids who come out only at night and have swimming pools and numerous shower heads because god knows you’re not getting enough water when you shower. But now that I’m older, I realize… my mom’s ‘hoarding’ was actually a noble act of providing for her family back home…. she’s not just a nut like I thought she was.
(BTW: Happy Filipino American History month everyone!)
Does any of the stuff ever make it to the Philippines? I have a similar room except the stuff goes to Guatemala,where my husband’s family lives.So I know how you feel!
Growing up, I lived with my grandmother, who supported her entire family during the Depression. Our house was neat but the attic was full to the rafters with jars of change, old bags, shoes, etc. She wasn’t thinking of sending it somewhere, though–that is nice. She was just convinced the good times might not last. It’s a good idea to reexamine if something doesn’t have another use–she was right!
I come from a family of hoarders. Boxes stacked to the ceiling, closets filled to the brim, countless dressers or chests to be filled by mounds and mounds of clothes. *sigh I use the show Hoarders as motivation to NOT hoard.