Replace the Ceiling Fan

I told my brother I wish I took "before" photos of the rooms I cleaned. He said, "Don't worry, it'll be filled with junk soon enough and you can take photos then." I can't tell you how hard I laughed. I'd rather laugh than cry.

My mother climbed the stairs slowly to inspect the "clean" room. This is the moment of dread, where all can turn bad. She stood for a few long quiet minutes (quiet being a complete rarity in this house) and said to my brother, "While the room is clean would you replace the broken ceiling fan." It was a command, not a question.

"What do you mean while?" he laughed. She laughed too. And we all said amen silently.

The reason the ceiling fan is broken is a mystery but I can bet that something from the very high stacks of stuff fell on it:



NOTE: This is the room AFTER I cleaned it. See the tall stack of linens in the corner? These were previously on this chair piled half way up the window:



The Missing Air Conditioner

"Oh there is Mommy's air conditioner. She couldn't find it so she bought a new one." my brother told me. The amazing thing about the air conditioner is that it's very clean - no dust anywhere on it because it was covered with so much stuff. I left the air conditioner exactly where I found it. You can get a sense of how high the stuff in the room was piled by looking at the photo:



The air conditioner is on the small table on the right.

Found Treasure

I read some blogs yesterday about children of hoarders and the shame they feel. I have never felt shame about my mother being a hoarder. When I was a kid I had all kinds of friends over and they all thought my house was a blast, a funky living museum. There are always treasures hidden among the hoarder's junk. Here are just a couple of the many treasures I noticed while cleaning out the small upstairs bedroom.

McCoy Vase


Nancy Drew Series (arranged in numerical order, of course)



Notice the stack of old magazines on the shelf under the Nancy Drew series. I bet there's some interesting ones in there. The magazines remind me of my maternal grandmother, Marian. When I was in high school in the early 1980's she had stacks of old magazines from the 1950's which she was keeping because there were some articles in there that she never got around to reading. She did eventually read the articles and when I asked her what happened to the magazines she said she threw them out because she was finally done reading them.

Genetically we're all savers in this family. It's hard to find the line when it turns from organized chaos to just chaos.