(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.
