There was – maybe still is – a show on TV called The Hoarders – people who can’t seem to part with anything. Their homes are jam-packed with junk.
We may not be in the official “hoarder” category, but Nancy and I have also amassed many things we can’t seem to part with.
Like coffee cups and mugs.
I moved to Charlottesville as bachelor in 1967 and brought along one coffee mug from home. We still have it. I believe we have coffee cups in our cabinets that came over on the Mayflower.
Recently, Nancy bought 4 beautiful new coffee mugs, but we had to do quite a bit of shuffling in our cabinets to find new homes for the mugs. Why not just toss some of the hundreds of coffee mugs we have stowed away? Somehow, it doesn’t seem right. Afterall, the cups still work – they still hold coffee and you never know when 50 or 60 people might show up unexpectedly and need cups for the 10 gallons of coffee we would have to brew.
Pots and pans are other difficult items to part with. I have maybe 5 or 6 frying pans on shelves downstairs that were once non-stick but have since been scratched enough to clearly fall in the “will stick’ category.
Throw them away, you say? But they still work. You can still fry stuff in them and if you scrape carefully, you can get most the sticky stuff off the bottom of the pan.
And board games – we hoard those as well. We have them all in the basement – Monopoly, Clue, Parcheesi, Risk, Scrabble, Sorry, Yahtzee, Cribbage, Battleship, Chutes and Ladders – we still have them though it’s probably been 40 years since we last played a board game. Yet, what if the 50 or 60 people who show up unexpectedly want to play a few board games while they drink their coffee in our hoarded mugs while I fry up some bacon in our “will stick” frying pans?
You just never know, and I guess that’s why we are hoarders as well.
