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.
