Hoarders

[sueluvshalloween]

Shanda, I'm the same way. I also have a hard time letting go of things and will allow myself to develop emotional attachments to things, especially if they were things my kids made when they were little. But what I have is under control and isn't in huge piles taking over my house. I have a storage room in my house (down here in Texas it's called a "Texas basement" since we don't have basements). It's organized in bins. Now, I don't save every single scrap of paper that my kids ever wrote or drew something on, and I have gotten rid of a lot of their old clothes and toys, but there's just some stuff I could never part with. And I do reach a point where I can throw things away, so I'm not living amongst a hoard of junk. But I do understand where some of these people are coming from, as one particular episode of the show really hit home. I was in the same place emotionally as this one woman and know where she was coming from.

[Midnite Shadow]

You should see my Mom's house and basement and garage...and storage place

[sueluvshalloween]

Midnite, how long has your mom been saving or collecting things?

[Midnite Shadow]

Since before she was born LOL. My Grandparents grew up in the time of the depression and never threw anything away. They passed that mentality on to my mom. When my grandparents died and we had to get all their stuff out of their house...guess where it ended up?

My parents house was already bad and the basement is a catacomb of stuff with 'aisles'. Now it is even worse. I can't imagine what I will do when she passes away. Just get a huge dumpster and get rid of stuff after a BIG estate sale.

[Murfreesboro]

my mom has boxes and boxes of checks from when her bank sent back cashed checks, she has them from the 50's!!
Boxes and boxes of checks......crazy

You know, the funny thing about checks like that is that they actually tell stories. You can look through them and tell what was going on in the person's life right then, what he or she valued, etc. My mother pointed that out to me decades ago, when she ran across an old checkbook from, maybe, 15 years earlier. She could read through it and tell about the progress of my father's terminal illness, stuff about me when I was little, etc. It was a kind of diary, actually.