(Yankee) Hoarding - Part Four - "Kept"

(Yankee) Hoarding

Part Four

"Kept"

            There are problems with hoarding... that have nothing to do with hoarding.

            Those are the biggest problems with hoarding; the ‘have nothing to do with hoarding’

            Problems.

            Yes... you know them.  You’ve even seen them on television

            Too.

            A spectacle.  Blubbering, screeching refusal to give up a life’s “collection” of canary cages, each “from the trash” (found on the roadside trash), never cleaned but stored as methodically-meticulously “KEPT”.  “KEPT” is a noun; a qualifier of hoard.  But... each canary cage becomes a shudder down the spine of scripted hoard horror.  “WHY THAT COULD BE YOU DEAR... and all that STUFF you...”

            “Dear?”

            Stuff you

            Hold dear.  You hold on to the edges of yourself on earth with your “dear” hold on hoard.

            “Dear”.  “I have known you have this problem for a long time.  You hoard

            Dear”.

            First there is ‘collection’ and ‘collecting’.  Most never do that well.  ‘Collecting’ breaks for ‘accumulation’ right along.  It is a combination of finance, object supply, object quality and

            Human expression of suppressed human energy...; the ‘grab and go’ mantra, that skids the collect to accumulate to

            The discovery by self that one is out past the boarders of hoard; the landscape changed and one did not notice?

            Or care?

            The meaning of hoard is ...hoard is... meaningful.  My “kept” is a noun.

            Most who are out there on the borders do not know it.  The shoe ‘collections’ (Part Two) are rampant.  And real.

            Never edited.  Never purged.  “Kept”.  That simple.  “There’s some more (hoard) over there.”  The seed packets from the last fifteen years of ‘my gardens’.  “LOOKED THROUGH THEM” you speak out as “DOING”.  They now resemble five or six cubic feet of “clutter” in a “the garden shed”.  “Why do they put so many seeds in so many packets I do not understand that”.

            “TO SELL THEM TO YOU

            YOU IDIOT.”

            And that works out very well for them.

            “Some of the seeds are probably still good”.

            Probably they are.

            The qualifier again is ‘KEPT’; a noun.

            What happens next?

            SIXTEEN YEARS of ‘kept’ seed packets.

            Meanwhile the old MAN over there has promised to “CLEAN OFF” the “TOP OF MY TOOL BENCH” for sixteen years

            Too.

            “Idiot”.  That is the way the tool bench IS.  It is hoard.  He made it; a ‘his hoard’.  It will die there when he dies.  I will clean it off.  Half completed anything and everything.  His ‘kept’ is my ‘clean off’.

            What do I care that your not around to

            Poke it.

            Don’t you just LOVE to poke a dead man’s hoard.  You walked by the dead man’s tool bench for forty years and ONLY TODAY when MY HAND reaches out do you say “I AM SURE THAT...”.

            No.  You cannot have it any more; his tool bench hoard.  Go back home and

            Sulk

            Astride your own penny anti basement tool bench.  FINALLY GONNA FIX THAT LIGHT ‘above it’ you say?  “FINALLY” you say?  You are a problem of hoard. 

            YOU SUCK AT IT.

            False starts and stalls.  Most collecting turns to accumulation and this... rots... into hoard.  Yes:  Twenty years.  No... Forty... SEVEN years... and that’s the “I GOT TO SHOW FOR IT”.  Shoes.  Seeds.  Tool bench.  Scrap wood saved.  Books.

            “OH GOD DAMN YOU AND YOUR BOOKS”

            “SOME OF THEM... are very good (“RARE”) books.  I AM SURE”.

            “Should you find one of them in your HOARD... sir... tear the title page out and

            SAVE IT FOR ME”.

            “Oh no... you must be joking.”

            No... just observing the JOKE IS ON YOU.  Making your wife carry your old books down flights of stairs.  She survives you and you GIFT HER your HOARD you told me was your “RARE”  “BOOK” “COLLECTION”.  Her old ankles are going to give out SIX STEPS UP FROM the bottom of the LAST FLIGHT of STAIRS down and out of...

            The..

            “No, no, no:  I understand concisely that it was, as you say... your

            “COLLECTION”.

            HALF of the ‘silverware’ in the ‘silverware drawer’ WAS NEVER USED and was

            HOARDED by you in that drawer and

            NONE OF IT WAS... even... SILVER (“Sterling 9.25 pure silver”).  You hoarded silverware and never had any silver... too?

;            You hoarded THAT?

            As I said... hoarding... YOU SUCK AT IT.

            You are a problem of hoard.

            And you are very clear that you.... YOU

            “DO NOT HOARD”.

            Of course your right:  The old stone walls made of your family’s preference for hoarding old granite field stone back before the Revolutionary War... was, you are clear... someone else’s doing and ‘I didn’t know that was hoarding until you (I) pointed it out”.

            This is exhausting.

            This hoard; hoarder hoarding...:  Is it; the gum stuck under the school desk seat...

            Hoard too?  Your miserable.

            You do not hoard... and you are quick to point out a hoard and its hoarder... when you ‘see one’.  You are the problem of hoard.  You do not hoard.  And you know what hoard is.

            Yet you hoard... and do not know what hoard is.

            Very primitive, your behavior with ‘stuff’.  Your ‘stuff management’ is poor.  At best.  Your knowing eye?

            “What’s that?”

            One old woman’s silver drawer ...is filled with silver she found and hoarded.  It is her ‘kept’.  Her drawer is full of old silver.  The drawer is closed.  You cannot see it.  You don’t look in your own silverware drawer very much so... why should you look in hers?  “Her DRESS is a little OLD” you say.  SHE HAS... as ‘kept’... EVERY English nineteenth century transferware platter she has ever been able to purloin... some perfect... some smashed to smithereens.  “Oh” you say and admit that you’d “SEEN THEM” hanging on her “WALLS”.  Well... let me say that all you saw was SOME of them; SOME of her old... platter hoard.

            Rockingham.  English Rockingham.  She did that too; ‘Kept’.   Shelves of it.  Soap dishes, toddy pitchers.  Tobacco jars.  Chamber pots (“piss pots”).  Her ‘kept’ (hoard) of that was a rather ‘dirty CLUTTER’ on the shelves of her old cupboards.  Some of them; her ‘kept’ cupboards... had ‘blind doors’ she kept closed to keep her ‘kept’ from prying eyes.  Yes:  She ‘found you out a long time ago.  You are her enemy.  Of hoard.

            When I would talk to her... that was before she DIED, of course... we would say... in confidence... how ‘little’ you know.  That is what we would say.  And how little you have (‘hoard’) (‘kept’).  And how BAD that little you ‘kept’ IS.  And how you don’t know.  And don’t know... very much about hoard.  Accumulation.  Collecting.  “And stuff”.  How little you know and

            HOW MUCH YOU SAY

            About this ‘how little you know’.

            She never got along quite as far as I have in this ‘of hoard’.  I have an amplified obsession with eighteenth century English earthenware ceramics.  I mean... I am just NUTS about the stuff.  It’s very rare and all that of course but, too... it takes a person a while to get there.  You have to hoard so much.  “Kept” so much.  And then throw it out.  Too.  I already told you:  Hoard is about throwing out too.  I know it is hard... for you...

            To throw hoard out (“Yankee Hoard good sense” Part Two)

            When you have no hoard... at all.