The Gentle Art of Hoarding

Webster says that to hoard is to amass supplies, or to store up beyond one's needs. Guilty as charged. I am a hoarder. But please do not confuse me with those people you see on television. I'm not one of those hoarders!

No, I prefer to use the qualifier, "gentle," to describe my hoarding style. Yes,if you should happen into that little niche in my bedroom where my sewing machine lives--especially after I have just ransacked the storage closet for a certain piece of fabric, or hauled out all of the under-the-bed storage bins in search of a zipper or an applique--then you might mistake me for one of those hoarders. Indeed, under those conditions, you would be entering my craft zone at your own peril, because there would be boxes and baskets and fabric--piles of it--everywhere. (I confess to having accumulated several bruises myself while navigating those piles in an attempt to reach my sewing machine.) But I can explain...I was looking for something that I needed for a project that I was hotly pursuing, and if I paused to put things away before I moved on to the next step, I'd never accomplish anything!

And it's not just craft supplies. My passion for collecting things does not discriminate, and I have treasure stashed in nearly every room in our house. All of our beds are but storage units for the boxes of things I have hidden beneath them. Our coffee table is a coffin-sized trunk with a top that slides open, and there is not a square inch in any of our kitchen cabinets that is not home to some inexplicable treasure. My favorite home furnishing is a good basket; I actually hoard baskets to keep my hoards in.

But I say I am a "gentle" hoarder as opposed of "rough" hoarder, because, except for that one little area of my bedroom--and the spare room, where everything lands while it waits for me to find a place to put it--my stash is neatly hidden away. Most of the time. Until I have to look for something.

Now, allow me to get the point of this blog. Were I not such a gentle hoarder, I would not have had occasion to find myself in that spare bedroom today, pulling boxes of unremembered treasure from under the bed. There was no sense of cohesiveness in the collections I found in those boxes, and if I ever had a reason, a conscious thought of this will be a good place for this, I have completely blotted it from my memory. But that in no way diminished my pleasure in discovering a collection of things like this:

In among a satin purse containing my mother's leather gloves and a pair of vintage 1970's bikini underwear that I received at my wedding shower, underneath a cardboard Christmas wreath fashioned by my son using one of those green plastic leis and a cheap foam Santa pilfered from a poinsettia plant; all jumbled together with pictures and crafts made by both my own kids as well as the kids I used to babysit for, among all of those cherished items, I found a pile of cards our family had crafted for each other through years of special occasions. I have laughed until I cried during my trip down Memory Lane this afternoon, and was thankful that, no matter how much crap treasure I have amassed, I have always been able to find a place to keep the things that are important.