Still, I figure that I’m only at Stage One of Matt Paxton’s “hoarding scale.” I’ve got clutter and I’ve got a basement full of “stuff,” but my house isn’t structurally damaged, there aren’t narrow passageways between piled up newspapers and trash, and the upstairs rooms are neat and tidy (excepting, of course, the bedroom of my youngest, at-home-in-the-summer son). But, as one reads “The Secret Lives of Hoarders,” it’s hard not to hear a small voice whispering, “There but for the grace of God . . . . ”
Paxton runs Clutter Cleaner, a Richmond-based company that specializes in total-house cleanup. In the more extreme cases described in this engagingly written book, that means the removal of mountains of garbage and the bodies of dead pets, the excavation of almost geological strata of trash, the occasional discovery of long-lost valuables, and, in many cases, a referral to appropriate counseling for the homeowner.
The most famous hoarders in American history are the Collyer brothers, whose story has inspired both articles and novels, most recently E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer & Langley.” Living in a New York mansion stuffed with newspapers and debris, one sibling was accidentally crushed to death by falling junk, and the other, unable to move on his own, gradually starved. One or two of the people in “The Secret Lives of Hoarders” make the Collyers look like rank amateurs.
“Rank” is the mot juste too. Time and again, Paxton mentions the stench — from urine, feces and decaying food — that he encounters on a job. Take the case of Margaret, who “had been hoarding so many years that her possessions had started to decompose at the bottom of her five-foot piles. Everything in her double-wide trailer home was either broken, rotting, or chewed or peed on by the fifty or so dogs that had free run of the place. There was extensive water damage from broken pipes, with walls and ceilings split and falling down in spots. The house stank, it was hot, and the air was thick with dust. Cobwebs waved from the ceiling and flies buzzed at all the windows.
“In the kitchen, spoiled food stank up the refrigerator, and dirty dishes were molding in the sink. Cockroaches scattered whenever items were moved. The narrow walkways between the piles were swimming in a thick brown muck that actually sucked one of Margaret’s clogs off her foot as she walked through the kitchen on cleanup day. She ignored it and kept walking.”
Usually called in by a relative or the local government, Paxton often needs to spend time just easing the hoarder into accepting the need for a cleanup. In many cases, he recognizes that once he’s gone, the steady accumulation will start again.
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