I spent most of the day yesterday helping my mom clean the basement out. My mom is something of a hoarder. Not an extreme case by any means, we aren't talking about foot-wide pathways through stacked items or anything, but the basement has accumulated a lot of stuff over the years, as basements do, and she's had a hard time getting rid of a lot of it because much of it is meaningful to her in some way - my grandmother's four poster beds, or my great grandmother's nightstand. And of course, old things from when my sister and I were little kids. Stuff like that.
The hoarding thing never made sense to me until about two years ago when one of our cats died very, very suddenly. She was a sweet little orange cat we got from a shelter and named Biscotti. She had come to the shelter weighing only three pounds even though she was about two years old, they thought, and they had to put weight on her before they could spay her. For a cat, she was clumsy, but she made up for it with determination. We got two from the shelter and they were a study in contrasts - Cappuccino, a big, mostly white patch tabby, is so graceful you would almost swear that he levitated rather than jumped. When Biscotti made the same jump, she wouldn't quite get there, she'd get her forepaws on the thing she had jumped to and then scrabble up with her rear legs. Very un-catlike in some ways.
One of her eyes watered and she would constantly get crusties there, which I would wipe off with a wet ball of cotton on a daily basis. Cappuccino, on the other hand, never got crusties. He is big, even for a male, and muscular, and fast, and powerful. I wonder if he might not have a bit of Maine Coon in him, he's such a big beautiful bastard. She was little, even for a female, with stubby legs that reminded me a little of munchkin cats, and she got fat quickly. When we got her she was five or six pounds, and she got up to 11 before we put her on a diet. She would eat ANYTHING. She was a stray from what we were told, not feral, much too easy to handle for that, but a stray of some kind, and I think, based on her weight when the shelter got her, she must have been starving.
In spite of all this, she was kind of in charge, between the two cats. When she wanted a piece of territory, she did this thing where she would come right up to whoever was in it and sit down right next to them with absolutely no regard for personal space. She managed to conquer most of the household that way, except for a few places she begrudgingly shared with Cappuccino. I say begrudgingly, but really, it wasn't - they cuddled together, and she would hold him down and groom him, like he was a big, stupid kitten.
She groomed me, too. She would come to my bed when I was lying down and get up near my head and lick my hair and head. Or sometimes when she was at the top of the cat tree, if I walked up to her and leaned my head against the platform she was on, she'd groom me. Her breath was a little fishy, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It sent little shivers racing down my spine, like getting a massage sometimes does. She was affectionate to me, like I was a big, stupid kitten too. And she luxuriated in being pet and scratched as only cats can. One of the things I feel like she taught me is that love IS touch, in some sense. When she died it hit me like a truck, way harder than when any of my grandparents died, almost as hard as loosing some of my friends had, and I wondered why that was. I think the sense of touch is connected to love the way the sense of smell is connected to memory - there's probably some amazing brain chemistry there somewhere. I don't know that much about the brain, but it seems to me that it was in large part because we touched each other so often and so unselfconsciously that it hurt so much to lose her.
Anyway, she was about five when she died, we think. She used to wake me up in the morning at the crack of dawn to be fed, as is the way of cats. And on this particular morning, which was Independence Day, 2021, she woke me up, and I fed them both, and then went to go write, because early morning is often when I write these days, and they were fine. About a half an hour later I heard one of those low moans cats sometimes make when they are really upset come from the other room, and I thought there must be some animal or something outside, because the two cats we had never fought, but it sounded serious, so I went to go check it out.
She was lying on the floor with her arms out like she was trying to scratch, and Cappuccino was sniffing at her. Her hind legs were kind of bunched up like she was going to jump or something, but her belly and forelegs were flat on the floor and it looked like all her muscles were tensed. An odd position, one I had never seen a cat in before. I knew something was wrong, but not what. She made this sound like she was trying to vomit the biggest vomit ever, maybe, this heart-wrenching, guttural, mucus-filled exhalation - I had a girlfriend describe something similar issuing from me one time when I apparently OD'ed and stopped breathing for a few minutes. I guess I made a similar sound when I started breathing again. She said she had never been more grateful for such a disgusting sound. But maybe in Biscotti's case it was the death rattle? I'm not sure, but that was that. Her body totally relaxed after she made that noise, and she died. I don't think thirty seconds had passed from the time I first heard the moan.
I rushed her to the emergency vet, but I knew when I was putting her in the carrier that she was gone. She was so limp in my hands, her body just kind of folded and slid into the carrier. I remember being very thankful it was Independence Day at 5 AM because there was literally no one on the road and I tore ass over to the vet, going like 80 in a 35 zone most of the time. But it was too late, and I knew it was too late. I just couldn't let go without trying though.
Speaking of letting go, this is where the story comes back to hoarding. After she died, I remembered I had brushed her the day before, and I went to the garbage and it was only like paper and stuff, and her fur. And I took a ball of her fur out, and put it in a little plastic bag. It was like I just couldn't let this thing go, even though it was trash. It was her somehow - the two had become connected in my mind and if I had not been able to retrieve the fur before the bag went down the chute or got carried off by the trash guys, I would have been very upset, and felt like I threw her out somehow. She had become her fur in my mind, with all the emotional weight of the living being.
And that was the moment I understood hoarding.
So. My mom isn't that bad of a hoarder, but she's had forty years of living in the same place and the death of both her parents, her great aunt, both of my dad's parents, etc, and stuff just builds up. There's no actual filth thank god, but there's lots of stuff in the basement.
My dad has tried to help her with this stuff, but he doesn't understand and is not sympathetic to the fact that she has formed emotional attachments to it, so when he tries to help her with it, it deteriorates into arguments in the best tradition of people who have been married for fifty years. Somehow though, when I suggest she let something go, maybe it's the way I do it, she can let it go. Maybe it's because I let her go through it. Maybe it's because when she sees something that makes her sentimental, I say ok, mom, take a picture of it if you want to remember it, and then let's let it go. We made really good headway today, I took out like three big bags of trash, two bags to drop off to goodwill, and I took the last little bit of crap I had over there, left when I went to school in the nineties. Even my dad was happy with the sheer volume of stuff that went out. But of course, there really were some treasures mixed in with the junk. One thing was a picture of my Great Uncle Bud from WW1. It lists him as US of A Company B 339th Machine Gun Battalion (I think - if anyone else can make out the writing and thinks it's something else, let me know). I think these things were filled out by the family, but I'm not sure.
My Great Uncle Bud was a quiet man from rural Iowa. And also apparently a motherfucking machine gunner in World War One. I remember seeing his uniform many years ago over at my Great Aunt's, and being struck by how small it was. People were smaller then. The diet has changed and I think the additional protein makes people bigger. In Japan, you can see this generationally as more meat has been added to the diet - my wife's brothers are both like over six feet tall. Her dad is about my size, maybe a little smaller. I never met her grandpa, but I'm told he was about the same size as her grandma, who, granted, was old and hunched as hell, but stood perhaps a little over four feet tall.
A motherfucking machine gunner. Jesus.
The experience made me think about the word "hoard" and the nature of a hoard, and I wondered if anyone has done dragons as hoarders in the sense that they are emotionally attached to the items in their hoard. The reason they know you stole a single gold piece is because that was a gold piece their grandfather dragon was given by his mate, Arenisamalirestasiya the Cobalt, as a weregild for killing one of their hatchlings. And that other gold piece came from the treasury of the Lord Potentate of Rilenas, the Grey Capital, when the dragon took vengeance upon him for denial of the monthly tribute of cattle. He melted and burned the entire treasury excepting that one piece. And on and on and on, all the items have a story or provenance and in some way they ARE that experience or that being for the hoarder, and loosing the item is like loosing that experience or that being.
The other thing I found was a stack about a foot and a half high of hardcopies of my writing dating mostly from the 1990s. Mostly poetry. I thought this stuff was GONE. I burned a whole bunch of it at one point, but that was in Iowa City, and I guess this stuff, probably moved to my folks place around '96 or so, got forgotten about. If I had known about it, at the time, I would have burned it alongside everything else. But as it is, I'm kind of grateful that didn't happen. Some of it is pretty good; most of it is crap. Above all, looking at it now, it seems absolutely filled with anguish to me. Some of it hurts to read.
I went through a little of it earlier, and will present some of it here from time to time, just for the hell of it, probably. Here's one that jumped out at me after paging through this stuff. It's untitled.
we polluted ourselves, defended ourselves
goodbyed ourselves - disintegrated back into mother
flesh, mind, spirit and thumb turn back
to simple black soil.
(He struts and skips
his sloppy trudge
grinning at every worn
corner and whistling
a work chant through
broken tongue and cheek)
Dirt and sea start a seed
send it straight, secure it soberly
shape it sincere
and soon we'll see a storm-free state
soon we'll form a free state
of self-centered
yet useful hour users,
mainstream minutemen
hardened into a bloodstream antfarm;
every living title holding weight
worth highstar united.
Always asking why over and over
seems to be our mistake over and over.
(Her father had a little
time to sing a leather
ballad, to slap the rhythm
so pink on youth,
to spit the chorus through
bourbon breath, inhale ethyl
exhale rage.)
King me daddy, we all live in the as is goodness,
now perfect shrine.
Christ me daddy, we all see visions of sickness,
all feel waves of panic.
God me daddy, we all seem so much better off
when we feel dawn caving in,
a blistered black parable
singeing the outer question:
has daddy finally dropped the bomb?
or will father freakshow surprise us
with another one of Noah's great escapes?
(She glances at the riots
innerwhite cotton everything
like a silk iris wrapped
tight in its own bold beauty
and fading delicacy)
The seeds are scattered again,
same as before,
while we all sit patient and wait
for our turns in the new footrace
bearing ripples of peach blubber
and amber waves of sainthood's
frivolous revolution.
(She ties her hair back
and grabs her books,
thinks how glad she is
that she doesn't live
in New York, turns
her pretty glare and
walks down into the
chaos...)
This is every day:
good as expected,
sour as birthing,
thin as starving,
dead as wishing.
(...shambles. Blames
the drink and stuffs
a twenty in her pocket,
rots her gut and feeds
that black tooth.)
Goodnight, Molly,
grin and bear it baby,
and next time ask for the gas.
