jujube
SF VIP
My grandmother and her sister were both hoarders to an extent.
Grandma was a very "neat" hoarder. The house was trim and clean to a fault and not cluttered, but the closets and cupboards were stuffed full of...well....stuff. She was a "shopaholic" who never met a sale she didn't love.
If you saw something in the closet you liked and asked for it, she'd gladly give it to you. But, if someone was getting married and their wish list included a pressure cooker, instead of giving them one of the five brand-new still-in-the-box pressure cookers she had in the closet (that she had bought because they were on sale), she'd go downtown and buy them one. All the stuff she hoarded was new and useful. She just wouldn't "use" it.
Her sister, my great-aunt, saved EVERYTHING. Her house was full of rooms of boxes (neatly packed and always with freshly bleached and starched doilies on top of them....why, I don't know) of broken combs and hairbrushes, old toothbrushes, magazines, newspapers, every phone book for the city for the last 60 years, mail, every article of clothing she had owned, etc. The house was clean and smelled fine, but it was PACKED. Nothing organic, so no rats or bugs, but it was like she couldn't bear to part with anything she had ever owned.
I could never figure it out. They hadn't grown up poor. To the best of my knowledge, they hadn't suffered any "traumatic" event in their life that would trigger this kind of behavior.
Grandma was a very "neat" hoarder. The house was trim and clean to a fault and not cluttered, but the closets and cupboards were stuffed full of...well....stuff. She was a "shopaholic" who never met a sale she didn't love.
If you saw something in the closet you liked and asked for it, she'd gladly give it to you. But, if someone was getting married and their wish list included a pressure cooker, instead of giving them one of the five brand-new still-in-the-box pressure cookers she had in the closet (that she had bought because they were on sale), she'd go downtown and buy them one. All the stuff she hoarded was new and useful. She just wouldn't "use" it.
Her sister, my great-aunt, saved EVERYTHING. Her house was full of rooms of boxes (neatly packed and always with freshly bleached and starched doilies on top of them....why, I don't know) of broken combs and hairbrushes, old toothbrushes, magazines, newspapers, every phone book for the city for the last 60 years, mail, every article of clothing she had owned, etc. The house was clean and smelled fine, but it was PACKED. Nothing organic, so no rats or bugs, but it was like she couldn't bear to part with anything she had ever owned.
I could never figure it out. They hadn't grown up poor. To the best of my knowledge, they hadn't suffered any "traumatic" event in their life that would trigger this kind of behavior.