Years ago we had a neighbor who made the clutter of our seething-with-young-children household seem positively chic and spare and ultraminimalist. The fellow was a hoarder, and through his front windows you could see old paperwork and curling newspapers piled so high that his view of the street must have been obscured. We’d see him perform a quick dogleg maneuver whenever he entered or exited his front door, presumably to avoid knocking down any of the hallway stacks. I had mixed feelings about the poor guy. My primary emotion was pity; it cannot have been pleasant to live like a gerbil amid heaps and turrets of stuff. But I also felt a faint undercurrent of pleasant reassurance: No matter how the magazines and toddlers’ artwork might build up on our kitchen counters, it was nothing — nothing! — compared to the guy across the way.
Earlier this week, Washington Examiner reporter Caitlin Byrnes reported that 20,000 to 50,000 hoarders live in Montgomery County alone. It makes the national implications pretty staggering. The accepted figure seems to be that between 2 and 3 percent of the population suffers from the impulse to hoard, whether that means amassing food or objects or cats. It wouldn’t be surprising, either, if the numbers fluctuate according to events, with a kind of time delay. For instance, many of us have (or had, or are) grandparents who lived through privation in the 20th century and came out the other side with a ferocious determination never, ever, to do without again.
When my New England grandfather died, he bequeathed us a basement filled with rank upon rank of clean, stacked milk cartons. After the Depression, he could never accommodate himself to the throwaway society. There was no squalor in his hoarding, though; it was an expression of frugality. It’s amazing how often a clean, dry milk carton will come in handy around the house — it’s also stunning how many containers a frugal milk-drinking person can accumulate over time.
I feel sure that hoarders draw our fascinated stare in large part because many of us can secretly identify with their condition. Triage is hard. What to throw and what to keep, when everything has a story? As I look around my embarrassingly book-choked office, I can’t help but believe that hoarding exists on a spectrum.
And maybe that’s why the people who fascinate me are not the hoarders who can’t throw anything away, but the godlike ascetics on the extreme far end of that spectrum: the spare, ultraminimalist types who wear Calvin Klein and Jil Sander and walk about on the unencumbered, poured-concrete floors of glass-walled postmodernism. What must it be like to endure no clutter, because you have the cool self-discipline to prevent it? To suffer no tschotskes, because little fiddly knick-knacky items are for sentimental fools? Or to have walls bare of bookshelves, for now there is the Kindle? What must it be like, to be like that? Reader, I’ll never know.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
