Wasn’t feeling too great when I left the hospital yesterday, early, came home and lay down and switched on the television and watched House, then switched over to an episode of Intervention on A&E, followed by two episodes of the show Hoarders. Hoarders is about people who are out-of-control pack rats; their houses are filthy, crammed with stuff, mostly garbage and useless junk and broken furniture. I didn’t know this but there is a pack rat scale, one to five, five being the worst; last night’s first episode dealt with a grade five hoarder. The house was badly deteriorated, there was no water, no plumbing, the roof leaked, the walls and ceilings were broken and moldy, trash was piled up three feet deep, two dead cats found among the rest of the debris; this is not unusual on these shows. Bad as hers was, the episode I found most disgusting was a woman who hoarded food along with everything else, food everywhere, stuffed in three refrigerators, one of them held closed by duct tape, most of the food expired, exploded, rotting. Even the professional people who came in to help clean the house were gagging at what they were seeing and smelling.

I am fascinated by that show. There is a show on HGTV called Mission Organization, where one room in a home is taken over by the same sort of mess as the show Hoarders, but it is generally a clean mess, just too much stuff piled everywhere, like an office, or a garage, or a kitchen. The organizers come in and help them sort through what they really need and want to keep and then put in new furnishings and a system for keeping things neatly in place. The most difficult part of the process is at the beginning when the organizers and the messy person has to decide what to get rid of; these people have a real hard time parting with their things. My guess is they pretend to throw stuff away, and then when the camera crews are gone, go and retrieve it from the bins and stash it away out of sight. You have to wonder if these are hoarders in training, or if they have the ability to keep their pack rat tendencies somewhat in control, confining it to only one space. The show goes back after a time to see if the space is still in order, and of course it is; obviously, they clean it for the follow-up. Pack rats don’t want the world to know they are pack rats.

Collectors may be a species of pack rat. There is another show on HGTV called Cash in the Attic, where the host of the show and an appraiser to go a collector’s house and try to find items to sell at auction that will earn them money for a house improvement project. Again, the most difficult part of the process is finding things the homeowners can part with; as the camera goes through with them, you can see boxes and shelves and garages and attics and basements full of stuff they have collected, not even displayed, just put away, wrapped up and in a box somewhere. I am here on the spectrum. Holiday themed items are my downfall. I can’t resist adding ornaments and decorative touches to my collections; show me a Mikasa glass bowl etched with poinsettias, or a Spode cookie dish, or a Hallmark Barbie ornament and I almost have to take it home. Long ago, I used to work in a department store and managed to score all kinds of higher-end Christmas tableware and serving dishes at unbelievable prices. But there’s no way to use it all every year, and so most of it stays in boxes in storage. Could I get rid of it? We’re talking pain.

So when I’m watching these shows I have a lot of mixed feelings. One is, obviously, people, I can not believe you live like this! Well, yes I can. For a period of years, back when my children’s paternal grandmother was dying, I went through a deep and terrible depression and didn’t clean my house; you’d be surprised how quickly your house can turn into a pigsty. As it happened, we had put a live Christmas tree up that year, and I didn’t bother to take it down for two years, the thing was sitting there in the tiny living room, dried up and covered with ornaments, surrounded by trash a foot deep. It was pretty bad, there were dirty dishes and cat mess mixed in with the junk mail and old newspapers and toys and whatever else things that just piled up and piled up. After that time of my life was over, I reverted back to the normally clean life most people live; sometimes, when I am feeling a little depressed or the cats’ mess overtakes my time and ability to keep up, my house gets pretty squalid, but that doesn’t last long. Squalor depresses me more than the depression that caused the squalor, and also I get a little frightened that I may lose control again, sufficient motivation to get cleaning. But beyond that, deep down I like a clean, orderly house; nothing like a scrubbed floor to make you feel good inside. A day or two of cleaning gets everything back in order. To say the truth, watching those shows helps me: I get an urge to purge and clean and organize like crazy.