Dead

So. He's dead, my father. He died the last day of June. He was ninety years old, and had been in a nursing home since 2006, after a stroke put him there.

I was not surprised. He'd been fading for a long time, and he was very old. Even before the stroke he'd had some dementia.

In the end it was an infection. Friday he was moved from the nursing home to the hospital, and by Sunday morning he was dead.

I am not sad. There is nothing for me to mourn. While I may still be in the process of mourning the father I never had, and while songs in particular about good fathers have been known to make me cry (Nanobots I'm looking at you) there's nothing there for the person my father was. He was simply too much of an asshole to me, to us, for me to mourn.

A year or two ago my therapist at the time asked me to come up with a good memory of my father. I think she thought I was being too negative about all this (she has since been fired, because you don't pull that attitude with a victim of abuse, sorry). I racked my brains and genuinely couldn't find one. I could remember him being nice to the cats, or pleasant to other people, but none of it directly involved me.

Not too long ago, a few months maybe, I did remember one. When we had that big blizzard in 1978, when I was in second grade, my father built us a sled trail. It went down a hill, up another smaller one, around a banked corner and ended by the stone wall in back. I don't remember asking him to do it. It is a good memory. I don't know now why he did it. We benefited from it, sure, but I have a really hard time believing he wasn't doing it primarily for himself, in some kind of vicarious way.

At any rate, that one memory is not enough.

I am relieved, which is not surprising; even if he had been loved by me, the death of someone so old who had been more or less a vegetable his last few years would have been a relief, because I'd know they were finally free of it. But he wasn't loved by me. I am not ashamed to admit it, though it makes me a little sad that it is true. Because everyone should have a father they love. Everyone should have a decent father. Everyone, every child is entitled to one.

A day or two after his death I realized that the sudden feeling of lightness, the feeling of my shoulders being down where they should be, was a feeling of freedom.

I think it was honestly the first time in my life I'd ever truly felt that way.

I think that says it all.

The Tetanus Burger 2012 Year-In-Review

Hey kids, it's that time again! Time for our annual round-up of what-all went away in the year freshly passed.

This year it's true we didn't get as much done as in years past; I think there are several reasons for that. One, it's just hard work and we're tired of it; two, we do actually have lives outside of cleaning up after our hoarder father; and three, I suspect that we've been doing jobs more or less in order of easy to difficult, meaning the things that are left are getting to be the problematic thorny sorts of things, or the ones that have been put off because X has to happen before Y can before Z, for example you can't really clean out something deep inside until you clean out the outside leading to it, that sort of thing. I mean maybe. On the whole it's all pretty problematic. Don't think, however, it's because we're running out of stuff to junk. Oh ho no.

Oh, also Larry, our redoubtable Volvo station waggon and our hitherto primary means of haulin', was out of commission for a time and a solution (i.e. a trailer) had to be figured out. That didn't help, I'm sure. Still, we did a fair amount of iron runs. Witness the below:

Given the trailer some of those were double loads, with both the trailer and the Bus filled up. All told it came to 5560 pounds of iron removed, or 2.78 tons, which is a little more than half last year's total.

As for cars leaving as per our Rusty's countdown, we only managed to get three out of here. We did, however, pass the half-way mark given the number that was here at the beginning of this blog and are down to eleven left, some of which are indoors and so not visible.

Good riddance, and Rusty say GOODBYE!

We also did several VW shows, which helped both get rid of stuff and put some cash in our pockets; I suppose I should mention that Tara has been quietly selling stuff on the side through ads on some VW fora, especially seats, which is good as they are kind of a pain to get rid of. (Basically they can go to the scrapyard with the iron, but you have to get them down to the metal; otherwise no one will take them.) So that's good too.

I wonder how long it will take to be done with this. It is such an odd idea, to someone who's lived here all my life (more or less); in some ways I simply cannot imagine this yard being clean. And while the goal is specific--to get the yard clean--I'm not sure I know what that means, or at least I don't know exactly the scope of the project, not really. We have just been cleaning whatever is there in front of us. There isn't really a set plan. Which can be fine; I mean obviously it's working. But I don't know what the real goal is, or how to really go about doing it, like with steps or markers for how far we've come and how far we have to go. I've been managing it a little, like with Rusty's countdown on the side, but that kind of goal-making is something that I think I was simply never taught, if not actively discouraged from learning. Because to a hoarder a clean yard or a clean house is an unthinkable horror. And part of keeping things as they are is to make sure the other people don't, or can't think of it either.

Hoarders are some nasty pieces of work.

The Plan

My father could argue with a lot. His arguments, in fact, could be absolutely completely stone-cold-from-another-planet illogical (not to mention more selfish than the average three-year-old's), but that made no difference to him. Of course; the main point was to defend and justify the hoard at all costs. Logic was such a little thing.

But somehow, my father couldn't really argue with gardens. I don't know why; he certainly didn't care about flowers. And usually he didn't care about anyone else at all or what they wanted (or what they needed, as in actual physical needs). But something about the amount of effort involved with gardens meant he would generally leave them alone. Or at least he did when he got older, after he retired.

It was about then, when he was in his late seventies, that he was persuaded (by Tara, and I don't begin to fathom how she did it) to actually start getting rid of some of the junk cars around here. I don't know why. I don't know if being retired made some kind of difference to his thinking, or if he started to not care so much anymore because he was older, but in the late 90s and early years of the 2000s he and Tara started, in earnest, to get rid of some of the cars.

I was back here by then. And I was afraid, with good reason, that these newly clear areas would soon get refilled with junk, either through new acquisitions, or through shuffling other crap around. So I made a plan.

It was a loose plan, but it worked. When he moved a car, or a pile of junk, or wood, or whatever, I planted a garden. Now not everywhere, of course; just in the places that made sense, like along the back of the studio, or in front of the shop. And, because we're talking about me, that means I double-dug those gardens, and hauled in compost from the dump er recycling center, and bought the plants myself and everything. I don't know why it worked, but it did. Somehow, and in a way I would have thought completely uncharacteristically, he was actually able to accept that I would have some kind of legitimate grievance if he then parked a car in front of (or on) that nice new garden I put in.

Honestly I still don't know why that should have worked. Maybe he just got tired in his old age, I don't know. But it did.

So when my sister rented a wood chipper (oh my gawd the warning icons on those things!) and reduced the giant pile of brush sorta kinda over by the shed to nothing much at all, I immediately claimed that space for my vegetable garden.

It's still there, though this year it was rather neglected, both because I was busy with kittens and because even though I managed to rabbit-proof and groundhog-proof the thing there was no chance of it being deer-proof. The fence just isn't high enough.

But I was out there today anyway trying to see if maybe there was some kind of harvest I could make, it being the day before grocery shopping and so a bit of a scrounge in the kitchen.

And as I was wondering I saw Spot. Spot the Cat. Spot the mother cat who had some kittens presumably about three weeks ago now. I hadn't seen her for a few days and was worried she'd do one of her disappearing acts, like she did this summer. Because, you see, she's scheduled to be hysterectomized at the end of the month, when those presumed kittens are around five weeks old, old enough to eat solid food and be without her for the day or so it takes to trap, spay and release her.

She was just sitting there, curled up over by a tree not far away. She was watching me, but not moving, which is a bit unlike her. She's pretty skittish usually, though she is one of the ones who will come all the way up into the breezeway for some cat food.

She was just sitting there, watching me. And I realized that probably meant that her kittens were not far away, probably in one of the junk cars around there.

So there I was standing at my garden fence, just by that brown Saab that has been moved from out back, wondering.

And then two little grey kittens came out from under the car, right by my feet.

I was shocked. Not that there were kittens after all (though I was certainly surprised to have found them without even trying), but that they didn't look very young at all. I had figured they should be about three weeks old now; but these were walking around just fine, and though they were quite round they were steady on their feet. They looked more like five weeks old to me.

I guess my math was off rather a bit. Which means that old Spot can be getting fixed sooner, rather than later, probably. So now I am going to see about getting her an appointment for next week.

Later I came out with some food and my camera. As far as I can see there are two of them, or two of them brave enough to come out into the open a little, anyway. I suppose I don't know that there aren't more.

The braver of the two is in the front here:



There is a tom-cat around here I've been calling Old Scratch, which is, actually, a name for Satan himself. Old Scratch (the cat) is kind of a grumpy-looking thing and a bit rough around the edges. I think he may be the father, since this second one is rather a dead ringer:



I am naturally (and provisionally) calling the second one Young Scratch. To be fair, he only looks like an evil grump in this particular picture. Otherwise he looked like a fine young cute little kitten, in a lovely dark smoky grey with the loveliest little silver feet.

I did manage to get a decent look at the first one's butt, and he is quite certainly a boy. The other one I'm not sure; s/he may be female, actually.

Here they are together:



Not long after I took that picture the little grey-and-white guy started climbing the tire of the Saab. Would you look at that:



I was surprised because I really didn't see how they could be that old, since as far as I know a kitten has to be about five weeks old to be doing that. I don't know. I've since googled kitten pictures by age and I don't think they can possibly be any younger than four weeks.

So, here's the plan. It's the usual one.

-Get Spot to somehow get herself into a trap, again. This may be a bit tricky as I've already caught her once and she naturally enough didn't really care for the experience, though I let her go once I saw she was lactating. I figure tuna will be my friend here.

-Win those kittens over and then get them inside. This will depend on how friendly they already are; with Splotch's set they just ran right up to us, but with Aleister, who is Spot's kid, it took a lot of work and patience.

-Foster and socialize them, then get them to the shelter to get their shots &c and eventually let them be adopted. Thankfully their eyes seem nice and clear, i.e. no infections.

Oddly enough I would have thought that would sound overwhelming; after all it's what I've been doing all damned summer. But I feel glad and relieved to have found them. Because if this gets done that's it, and it feels like the home stretch. Because in this case, hopefully, knock on wood, this is not a case of there is always more.

Wish me luck. Again.

Uncomfort

This past weekend my sister and I actually managed to wake up early enough both days to get ourselves to another car event. This time however it was not exclusive to Citroëns, though there were a few there (including my sister's Deux Chevaux), but to little cars and the people nuts enough to like (and own) them.

And when I say little I mean little. Micro, in fact.

Most of them were made in Europe and date from the 50s and 60s; I'm not sure quite what that says about Europe, though I suppose being infested with medieval towns with tiny alleyways is a reasonably plausible excuse.

There were Goggomobils



And old-school Minis



And the type of Messerschmitt that doesn't fly



Little Fiats (which I understand is short for Fix it again, Tony)



Wait, let's get a bit of scale on that:



As well as a few Isettas, which, and I am not making this up, are actually BMWs:



And in other things I am not making up, the Isetta was created by someone who also designed refrigerators, hence the door:



There was even an old Beetle there, though it was one of the bigger cars and looked, like the Deux Chevauxs, comparatively ginormous. Luxurious, even.

And again, though I don't generally care a whole lot about cars, I will admit to being amused by these tiny little micro cars. They're just so damned odd. And the people who own them and repeatedly attempt to get them running, in spite of the obvious and regrettable lack of common sense and sanity, are for the most part very nice, and quite funny, too.

So we had fun this weekend, and saw some friends. But it got me thinking about whether I'd ever want one. I don't know.

Because my main criteria for a car is comfort (well, reliability is good, too). And these, well, they're not exactly comfortable. First of all if you are a full-grown adult human you don't so much sit in one as wear one. Second, there is no such thing as air-conditioning in them, and in fact some of them don't even have windows that open, which, I'm sure you can imagine, is a whole boatload of fun on a sunny weekend in July. And honestly I don't know how anyone can drive a Goggomobil and remain conscious, what with the cloud of two-stroke fumes it doesn't have the power to get ahead of.

Because that is one of my bottom lines now: I will be comfortable. Because being uncomfortable is one of the things I remember most about my childhood. Now that may not sound like much; it's not really a big deal to be uncomfortable, right? It's not like actual physical pain. Except that it wasn't a temporary thing, a little thing. This was permanent, and across the board.

It's one thing to do without running water for a few days if say the water main outside your house bursts, or if you are camping. It's another thing to have no water at all most summers because the well went dry, and no water in most of the faucets anyway because when they dripped, and they all dripped eventually, my father's solution was to shut them off and walk away. Or to go without hot water for decades, because your father can't be arsed to install the water heater, which is sitting right there. Just like it's one thing to go outside and be cold in the winter, but another entirely to spend a long, long ride in a car with no heat at all, and then come home to a house set at 55 degrees. You simply never get warm in the winter.

It becomes the default, this lack of comfort, this profound unease. In winter you exist from that center of cold-in-the-bones, and any moment of warmth is the temporary thing. It always settles back to being cold, being uncomfortable. Worse yet, if I ever complained I was mocked, told it was nothing, not a big deal, what was I a princess expecting a life of luxury? That was the word my mother threw at me, princess.

And the old, shitty, non-heated, falling apart cars were of course a large part of all of that, especially since my father insisted on dragging all of us to all kinds of places like Import Auto Parts that we could not have cared less about. It was about control on his part as usual, I guess, or something to do with that personality disordered profound lack of understanding that people who were not him didn't naturally like everything he liked.

But getting back to the little car meet-thing. It's not exactly a big community, the micro car enthusiasts, especially given it's Massachusetts. And though the old Volkswagens aren't exactly micro cars, there is a fair bit of overlap in the communities. So there were more than a few old VW fans there.

Now my father worked out of a garage (or shop) on the property for something like thirty years, up until the mid 90s or so.

Saturday afternoon some of the little car people got talking about project cars they had (and trust me, little cars are invariably project cars). They were comparing numbers, how many of the things they had at the worst before they sobered up and came to terms with the fact that some of them were just never going to be fixable, and that they were just never going to have the resources to sink into some of the more hopeless cases.

I interrupted right there, and told them I had them all beat. Seventy-eight cars in the yard, I said. Then, when they looked at me in shock, I explained that my father was a hoarder who was also a Volkswagen mechanic, and one of the things he hoarded was old Volkswagens.

Then one guy looked at me and said, Are you Walter's daughter?

I am. And he knew. Despite the fact that my father hasn't been here in five years, and that he'd retired another ten years before that, and even though we were fifty miles from home, still, he knew my father, and he knew the property.

But then there's this part, and I don't know what to do about it.

Now I know that these people love their little cars; I get that and I think it's great that people have hobbies. I have more than a few myself. I can even, if not truly understand I suppose, accept that there are some people who simply love old air-cooled Volkswagens without being bad people, perhaps in the same way that someone can be fascinated with the history of Hitler's rise to power without being a Nazi. I get that, and while I will never understand why on a gut level I can see that it is true.

It's when they start going on about how great my father was that I get lost.

Although I can even sort of understand that part of it, I guess. If you only knew him through the Volkswagen stuff, if you'd only come by to look at parts, or ask him about your Bug (and he was always very happy to talk and talk and talk about VWs) you might think that he was just some nice older guy who was a bit eccentric, maybe.

Well maybe. Because how could you then look around at the yard and still think that? How could you see seventy-eight cars, even if in your eyes they weren't 'junk' cars, which were obviously taking over the yard, which were everywhere, in every space they could possibly fit, along with all the car parts and all the other stuff that was obviously junk, and also, also, know that there were children there, (Are you Walter's daughter?) and not think Wow this is fucked up? I suppose I could see if the person doing the observing was also a hoarder, but so far few of the people I've had this conversation with have given me that vibe (although occasionally someone really really does).

And then what do I say to that? Yes, I'm Walter's daughter. While I'm not expecting that you should have called CPS on my father's ass, how is it that you are standing there smiling at me about all this? I just said my father was a hoarder. I even asked if you'd seen that TV show and you smiled and said yes. Are you just not thinking? I understand this is a fairly shallow conversation, and I even understand that most people are not as ridiculously introverted as I am (and so deep conversations are not the default for you as they are for me), but really? That situation was obviously fucked up, you saw it, and you are standing there telling me about how my father had all this great stuff?

Over and over that is the reaction.

So where does that leave me? The older I get, the more I recognize and acknowledge the truth of the situation here, the less tolerance I have for just smiling and nodding when people start in about how great my father was and Oh wow all those Volkswagens! The hoarding, which included all those marvelous bugs and squarebacks and fastbacks and busses and campers and 411s and 412s and even that white pickup truck and the odd MG or Spitfire or Triumph or Datsun or old Saab 95 or 96, was child neglect and abuse. Making us live in all that, because his needs came first, was child abuse.

No, it's not that his needs came first, and this is the part that is so hard to articulate and make anyone understand, it's not even that; that implies that there was a hierarchy in his mind, that he had some kind of list in his head of people's needs that he had put in order, with his own at the top. The reality is that he was incapable of seeing or imagining that other people had needs at all. I have no idea, really, how my father perceived other people. Were they simply shadows cast on a wall? Things that could be talked at? Something that makes dinner? Noise, things moving, like some TV that you couldn't turn off? Something that's always trying to take his money? I honestly don't know. I really don't. Can someone tell me?

If I try to tell people well no actually you don't understand about him, he was a hoarder, it was hell growing up in that house, he was profoundly mentally ill, and this last one, that he was 'profoundly mentally ill' was an exact quote to this guy I was talking to on Saturday, it just gets glossed over. Like I said I understand a conversation with me sometimes, because I am so stunningly introverted, can be like wading into the shallows and suddenly stepping into the Mariana Trench. I get that. But they just nod and continue the conversation. I don't know what to do.

But that's the thing. I can't not say something. I can't just smile and nod when they go on about my father. I don't, really, I don't think, want to make someone feel bad, to grab them with a gotcha, to imply they are enabling something, glossing over child abuse like that; but at the same time, not saying anything is for me just more invalidation. It's me keeping silent, once again, as I always did.

I was trying to think the other day about what my father said that was so invalidating. And I couldn't really come up with anything. My mother, sure, oh I could think of plenty she said, but my father, no, I was coming up blank. And yet the almost overwhelming feeling I have of him is of invalidation.

He didn't need to say anything, that's the thing. Everything he did was invalidating to the people around him, his family. He didn't need to tell us we didn't deserve hot water; his adamant refusal to install the water heater until he did X, Y, and Z was invalidation enough. Especially since his reasoning was all couched in terms of his rights, not just what he wanted, but his rights; that he didn't have to, we couldn't make him, we didn't have the right to make him. And that is telling us that we didn't have the right to hot water, that we didn't ever have the right to be comfortable, to heat, to running water, to a yard not full of cars, to not be publicly humiliated (because everyone knew the yard was a junkyard), to have friends over, to have enough to eat, to be warm in winter, to have the lights on in a room with the window open in summer because the bugs could get in with the crappy screens we had, to eat in peace, to dislike certain foods, to have a closet to hang our clothes in, to get a gift that was our own; and anything we did get from him (and it was all from him, as he was the one with a job) was always so grudgingly given, couched in terms of how we should be grateful for getting even that and never forget that he was always entitled to a piece of it as he paid for it.

And still, when I mention any of that, these acquaintances who knew my father as the VW guy still stand there and smile and talk about how great my father was, as if they knew him better than I did. When I try to explain most of them just don't want to hear it. I know we have a problem with dealing with child abuse in this society. I do honestly think has its roots in that this society counts on certain kinds of inequality to function, and so not only wants to look the other way but must. I really do believe that. So nobody wants to hear it, to the point where most people out there will make excuse after excuse for abusers, even the really violent ones, oh he was such a nice guy when I saw him at the coffee shop, blah blah blah. But I just want to scream:

Dude. I knew my father. You didn't. You chatted with him about a mutual 'hobby'. You are making a whole lot of assumptions about him probably based in your own motivations, in your own way of doing things, assuming that he thought about things the same way you do and because you believe yourself to be a good person my father must have been one as well. And then when I say Well no he wasn't you don't want to listen. Do you know what you are saying then? You are saying that you who chatted with my father over a hobby knew him better than I did. Can you not see how stupid, how belittling, how arrogant that is? How profoundly invalidating that is of my own miserable experiences?

I don't blame you, I don't. I understand you don't want to hear it. But it is true, and I lived it.

I just don't know what to do with that.

Where We Were - 1992. Nauseating in more ways than one

In pawing through all the old photographs of the yard progress, there's a distinct lack of documented evidence to just how bad the yard was, at its height in the 1990s.

It was only in 2001 or so when we started to clean things thoroughly and document the evidence. This happened to coincide with the dawn of digital photography, so photos would be shot of the progress. These photos would become more plentiful as memory cards got bigger and cheaper.

But for pretty much that whole decade of the 90s there was no reason to waste precious film on pictures of junk! So very little evidence exists of how junkyardariffic this acre and a half property really was.

And- for most of the 90s Thalia and I were fresh out of high school and seemingly powerless to do anything about the junk, then later on busy at college or working and living somewhere else. Couple this with the fact that dad's business was pretty much winding down to a trickle and you get a situation where there were a grand total of 70-something cars in the yard plus lumber, junk, car parts, metal chunks, rusty rust, etc.. etc...

In 1992 I was in video school and I had built a homemade steadi-cam of sorts. I'm not sure if it was a success or not, but I tested the contraption by running out the front door and bounding across the roofs of the cars in the yard like a slower and slightly more cautious version of parkour freerunning. And here is the result, if you can stomach it.

So grab a paper bag and just let your eyes glaze over. Can you count how many cars there are in the yard? There's about 50 visible here, though there's about 6 indoors and another 20 or so not visible.

What is noticeable here is that the cars are all over the yard at this point in time, whereas in the 2000s they have at least been consolidated to one location. What are now great expanses of green and a usable driveway were just parking lots for non-running vehicles back then. And disclaimer: those last 5 seconds or so are an actual parking lot nearby, not our yard. I can't even imagine how much worse the yard would have been if the 78 cars were Cadillacs or some other land yachts. They'd take up twice as much space!

-Tara

Where We Were.. Where do we even start? - Summer 2004

We've got a new problem with Tetanus Burger, and it has to do with an overabundance of things...

No, not the hoard of junk, but the hoard of photographs taken of the junk, that predate this very blog. We've taken thousands of photographs over the past 10 years of the progress we have made. If you thought there was a lot of stuff now, wait till you see what we've already carted away! It's a little recurring section called "Where We Were".

And yet like attacking the junk, it's difficult to know even where to start with posting some of the photos. So for this installment, I've picked at random the Summer of 2004.

Back then, the Red Sox were just another team of lovable losers, we thought maybe John Kerry was a shoe-in for President, and it seems we were starting to make some genuine headway on the crap in the yard. This was the first summer we were more or less given carte blanche to do what was necessary.

Back then we were uncovering piles upon piles of rotted lumber, spare oil tanks (how the hell are you supposed to get rid of those?) 55 gallon drums full of broken glass and mystery liquids (what- we won't say, all we'll say is they're gone), extra storm windows brought home from the town dump, etc. etc..







Piles of iron? I know there's always more, but there was much more in the past, back when we were just hauling it to the dump and not getting any money for it either.



Cars? Well there were a lot more of them, in any color you want as long as it's rust. Keen observers can see that a few of these cars have been offered new leases on life or have simply earned a last minute reprieve from a certain and ugly execution.

What better place to store car seats which someone presumably saved since they were "GOOD!", than outdoors year after year in the snow, rain and sun? Better call Germany and tell those Volkswagen engineers how durable their "leatherette" fabric really is after 20 years of rigorous testing!



Oh, and that rusty rectangular tank to the left of those blue and mold colored seats? Some sort of parts cleaning bin that was half full of some nasty parts-cleaning liquid.. All gone, though I don't recall how we got rid of it. I think we brought it to the dump and dumped it into their waste oil. Anyway, it's gone. When I see people freaking out over recycling a foil wrapper off a burrito or a teaspoon of oil... I can't get very worked up about it considering what we've had to deal with.





Well, that's it for this installment. In our next riveting episode, we pay our respects to some of our honored dead. Yes, they came to this property, believing they would be restored, only to be thrown into the Colosseum and pitted against the undefeated champion, "The Claw".



Who will win? Find out!!

Crappy Holidays

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now, about my father and what his miserly bastard ways meant for the holidays. Any of you from dysfunctional families will I'm quite sure recognize just how not fun the holidays can be. Especially given the prevailing attitude of how the holidays are expected to be about family and closeness and happy puppy rainbow harmony et cetera ad nauseum and all that, and isn't it all lovely and ho ho ho light a candle blah blah. Which also of course means that if yours isn't, meaning, if your family is, well, kind of fucked-up, you're also pretty much expected to shut up and swallow it so you're not harshing anyone else's happy family holiday buzz.

Yeah, well fuck that noise. Crap but I hate denial. Sunshine, truth, and openness are the way to healing, I have found over and over and over again. So.

My father was a miser; I believe I may have mentioned this a time or two. His OCPD need for control, as well as his OCPD focus on his own self meant that he had little concept that people other than himself (like his own children, say) had needs. And if he did occasionally have a little concept that they might in fact have needs (usually yelled into him by my mother), he could only assume that those needs were just like his own. This is a little tricky to navigate, you understand; because although I know that this inability was due to something he could not at all help, his personality disorder, I also know that it made things, well, hellish and impossible for the rest of us. So on the one hand there is: he couldn't help it. And on the other: it did incalculable damage to the people around him.

Perhaps I simply need to put it in a little bit of perspective. Perhaps, also, there is the sort of general opinion of hoarding as a harmless personality quirk. Hoarders are simply eccentric, right? Luckily I think that is finally changing, with the advent of TV shows like Hoarders, which, I reiterate, I have never seen, and it's just as well. I can't promise I wouldn't fire a bullet into the TV screen, Elvis-style.

But that perspective: I need to, I think, keep in mind that other personality disorders include Narcissistic Personality Disorder (though strict Freudian spelling says it ought to be 'Narcisstic', I mean, not that I'm a fan of Freud; the best description I've ever found for the man is simply 'dickhead,' as in, that was entirely what his brain was preoccupied with) and Antisocial Personality Disorder. And no one argues that these things can not be extremely harmful to the people around them, especially when one considers that Antisocial Personality Disordered people can include, say, serial killers.

Anyhow. So he was a miser. This affected plenty of things, of course, like keeping the house at a toasty 55 degrees in the winter, not wanting to spring for supplies for installing the water heater (which water heater someone actually gave him), the state of the yard, as he regularly brought stuff home from the dump (hey it was FREE!), and, and this is a big one, the food of the house.

Now, it doesn't help that my mother is, truly, the worst cook in the world; but even Mrs. Lovett would have been hard pressed to make a decent meal out of what my father thought adequate. It wasn't so much that he'd always buy the same cheap things, one green pepper, a pack of anemic-looking winter tomatoes, canned peas, a pack of chicken thighs, but that I swear they'd go food shopping and somehow come home with no food. I don't understand how this can be possible, even now.

I'm a freelance artist myself, which, alas, true to stereotype, is not exactly the most lucrative business in this society; and so I certainly know how to be frugal, and what it's like to not have the money to spend on much food in the first place. Still, though, I know how to shop for groceries, and to make the most of what I can afford. And so I've come to look rather askance at my parents' protests of But we can't afford it! from my childhood. I'm not sure I believe it, frankly. Like I've mentioned before, we were never on, say, food stamps or free lunches at school when I was a kid, and if we were that desperate that we couldn't afford heat, hot water, a decent amount of food, you know, the basics, don't you think we would have qualified? And so I suspect that simply no one could be bothered. That is damning, I know, and implicates my mother as well; but I don't see any other conclusion.

Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. But looking back on my childhood I see now that I really was an extremely thin kid; also, I recall that I had been treated for anemia several times over the years. This is undernourishment, no? Very probably.

So we didn't really have enough food. And so we certainly never had any fun food. We had ice cream once in a while, it's true; but that was because my father really loves the stuff and so in a way that was all about him. True, we did benefit from that a bit, which is good. But otherwise we only rarely had cookies, or fun stuff like that, and never candy, though my mother would always talk about how it was a bad thing to forbid children from having candy, because then when they grew up they would buy all the candy they never had and so get fat. Rank bullshit, that, by the way.

Somewhere in there, though, my father got in the habit of buying a weekly box of generic gingersnaps from the discount grocery store.

Okay. You have to understand a couple of things here. We didn't like gingersnaps, we kids; my father did. I believe part of his decision in buying them (beside the cheapness of the things) was that he figured no one would want them but him, and so he could have them all to himself. Well, he was mostly right. Truth be told, those gingersnaps were just awful. I can guess the recipe:

2 cups fine sawdust
1/2 cup molasses
Pinch ginger

Lay out a sheet of waxed paper on a cookie sheet.

Mix all ingredients together, then drop by spoonfuls on the cookie sheet. Press flat with the bottom of a greased jar; then bake in a 200˚ oven for a couple of weeks to harden up. Store indefinitely.

They were break-your-teeth horrible.

They were also the only sweet thing in the goddamned house.

So my sister and I would eat them. Not out of any kind of joy, mind you, but because they were the only vaguely treatish thing there ever was, and we were desperate for something with some sugar in it. Because we were kids, you know?

And my father would complain, of course. He would say 'the mice' had been into his cookies; I assume at the time he thought he was being funny, but, you know, it's kind of nasty. First, that's saying that those are intended for him and him alone and we kids didn't deserve anything fun; also it compared us to vermin. So fuck you, dad, as usual.

But we ate them. It was all there was.

But back to the holidays. Guess what we got for Christmas that year?

That's right. One box each of those atrocious cheap gingersnaps from my dad, all wrapped up with a bow. I wanted to scream and rage and cry, and then kill him. But I didn't. Because there was no point. He obviously thought he was so clever. I'd say smug, almost, except I don't think he was really capable of that; that would require some inkling, some acknowledgment that what he was doing was really rotten, and he just couldn't see it. But I still hated him for it.

You know what we really would have liked? A package of fucking Ring Dings.

I know. How immeasurably sad.

Gone Gone Gone

Well yesterday and today I started attacking some of my father's books that were still sitting in various bookshelves about the house. Now, I like books, quite a lot, but they have to be good books: ones that actually have some value to them. I mean, I know that is subjective, but they have to have either good pictures, up-to-date information, or good scholarship. The books my dad hoarded? Popular accounts of heroes from the 1930s, semi-sensational war tales, guides to mills of the Hudson River with just a scattering of small black and white pictures inside them, how-to books on taking good photos with few pictures in them (right, don't ask me how that works)—all this popular superficial stuff that was trash when it was new.

So last night I gathered them all up, from the remaining shelves in the piano room, and from the bookcase in the front hall over the phone. I threw them into the back of Larry the Volvo, where they sat a couple layers deep, and today I took them to the dump (sorry, recycling center). So much crap. As I was piling them in the swap shed I noticed that more than one of the books on Admiral Byrd (the famous Antarctic explorer) had Art Deco penguins on the covers; also, it came to me that 'Admiral Byrd and the Penguins' would be a fantastic name for a girl-band from the mid-60s. Or maybe a modern grrl-band, with a punk attitude and raucous sense of humor, preferably with a lead singer named Evelyn (Byrd's middle name, according to Wikipedia).

Anyhow they are now gone, though I am sniffling a bit again having handled them. And again, I apologize for the lack of before-and-after pictures, as I am still camera-less; I know how helpful they are, and, honestly, would love to see some myself. But they are gone now, and there are even more empty bookshelves.

I don't know what we are going to do with those empty bookshelves, though my mother has already claimed the one over the phone ('Go for it,' I told her). The ones by the piano were added in fairly recently, in response to his overflowing 'collection' of books; but they make it a tight fit around the piano. Now, the piano is in a bit of disrepair and isn't actually playable now, as one of the tuning pins sheared off and the dislocated string is affecting others; but I don't, actually, think it is a very difficult repair. And the thing is a Steinway grand, and otherwise a solid piece of work. I would love to be able to play it. Perhaps those bookshelves can just go themselves, and free up some space, since one does need a bit of room to play a piano.

All those crap books, though, got me thinking.

When my father was here he would sit and read those books on a regular basis. I don't for a moment think he read all of them, of course; I doubt there is enough time in a human lifetime. He had a lot of books.

I can't see that it ever made a difference, though. Let me explain.

When I read a book I am changed. I learn something. I acquire knowledge, or wisdom, or a new way of looking at the world; even if I disagree with what is said inside it, it makes me think. Even novels of a fluffy sort (though I tend not to read too many of those) alter me at least a little. But with my dad? As far as I could ever tell it just didn't. He read all the time, yet he learned nothing. He had all these books on, say, Charles Lindbergh, yet I never once heard him talk about him with any kind of expertise. You would think something would get in there. Well, if it did, it certainly never came out again.

Which isn't to say he wouldn't talk about these things. Oh he'd talk your ear off if given the chance—just it was always the same things, either the same stories of experiences you'd heard a hundred times already, or something very general about something he was interested in. If you asked him about, say, the Nazis, about whom he had many many books, on them and on WWII in general, he would just shake his head and say, 'They were very bad people.' I used to think it was because they were just so horrible he didn't want to go into detail, but now I don't know. I am realizing this makes him sound very, I don't know, slow, or something; but I wouldn't say he was. At least I always thought him fairly intelligent.

But he just couldn't change.

Nowadays, he is in a nursing home up the street. My mother brings him his Aviation magazine, and he sits there with his reading glasses on, and she flips the pages for him. From the outside it certainly looks like he is reading. But he isn't, and I know he cannot be, since after the stroke there is little left of his brain, and even before the stroke he was beginning to suffer some dementia.

Strange how so much of him was just a pattern. I don't think he has changed all that much.

Hard Enough

Yesterday and today I did a little cleaning of my own. I am in the process of converting my parents' old attic bedroom into an art studio/sewing room for myself, my bedroom being the other attic bedroom (there are two main rooms in the attic, as it's the usual old central-chimney New England colonial layout). Years ago, when I first moved out, my parents took what had been my childhood bedroom for their own. Which was, and is, fine, as it's on the first floor and meant at the time that my father (who was beginning to have some mobility issues) wouldn't have to climb so many stairs.

So in moving stuff into my new studio I've started going through some old stuff of my own in one of the attic closets, stuff that's been there only (and yes, in this house it really is 'only') ten years or so.

But I ran into a problem.

It has gotten more and more difficult to throw things away. I don't mean that in a personal pattern sort of way, either, as if the lessons my father taught me about how it's ALL GOOD and must always always be saved have been gaining some kind of ground in me of late. No, I mean it is actually more difficult to get rid of things these days.

Used to be, you just threw everything in a bag and brought it to the dump. Everything. Not now.

These days everything is recycled. Everything has to be sorted first, per order of the town. My town, in fact, just made it a requirement that everything you are to throw away must be in the official town bags, which cost $1.25 (for a small) or $2.50 (for a large) a pop.

I mean I get it. I consider myself an environmentalist, certainly, and, have, for example, committed to growing my garden organically. (Though I am also of the Derrick Jensen school of thought, and believe the focus on individual recycling is a red herring that lets the corporations—who do upwards of 90% of the polluting and environmental damage—off the hook while simultaneously passing all the blame on to the rest of us.) But they just don't think, sometimes, about the effects things like this have.

You could argue that everyone has to do it, and so that's fair. Right?

Ha. First of all there's this little thing about economic disparity. For poor people, that $1.25 a bag is a significantly larger proportion of their income than it is for non-poor people. That argument, I do believe, is what we in the activist community call coming from a position of privilege. So right off the bat, um no.

Now, for those of us who are poor (hello! I'd like to introduce myself) and who are cleaning up after a hoarder (which action the town has been on our backs about for years), this is actually not insignificant. It makes an already difficult job that much more so.

One might also argue that, well, this will train people to just use less. The less you use, the less you have to throw away, right? If you have to buy a lot of bags it's your own fault.

Which handily bypasses the bit about how the hoarded mess is not my fault. It is, in fact, no one's fault but that of the man in the nursing home down the street, who is now 87 and doesn't remember anyone's name. But it has to be cleaned, and so it falls on myself, and my sister, and my mother to clean up after him. People, incidentally, one could argue are the victims of his hoarding behavior. And remember, this is literally forty years worth of junk, some of it huge, impossible, and bewildering. Remember that giant horrible rubber life raft? How many little town bags would that have taken? At $1.25 a pop? You're telling me it's going to actually cost me money to clean up after the bastard who perpetuated this neglect and abuse on me?

Then there's the recycling itself. What prompted this post was finding a box of my old medications, stuff like cough medicine, aspirin, and supplements as well as some old prescriptions. I must have just shoved everything in a box when I moved, and then not touched it. Yesterday I looked into that box, incidentally filled with the leavings of mice, as it had been in the mousey old attic closet, and nearly despaired. Because the way the town has set up the rules, I cannot just pitch the whole damned thing into a bag. I had to go through it all, and make decisions about each little bottle, each individual thing, and then figure out what was the proper thing to do with it. I had to separate glass bottles from their plastic caps (non-recyclable, since they had no number on them), then empty and in some cases wash the bottles out before I could do anything with them.

Those of you familiar with hoarders may recognize this. It's remarkably similar in practice to any of the million excuses hoarders have for not throwing things away. Because they simply cannot do it, their brains come up with all these impossible conditions that must be fulfilled, like in a fairy tale where Our Heroine must first separate out all the dust from a huge mound of poppy seeds. If you try to throw something away that belongs to a hoarder (and it ALL belongs to the hoarder), they will tell you, NO, you must do this impossible task first. And when you do that? NO, you must also do this impossible task. And if you do that? NO! again, and on, and on and on and on. Because if it's impossible, it can't be done, and then their stuff doesn't get thrown away, which in a hoarder's mind cannot be borne.

So I am not surprised that I looked into that box and felt a paralyzing despair. It's already hard enough. It has always been hard enough. It has always been deliberately designed to be hard for us.

I mean I did it, though I had to put it off until the next day. I am capable of doing it, I know. But it's already hard enough just as it is.

HELP

This is a picture of me from 1975, up on a Fourth of July float in the local parade dressed as a little flower, protesting the environmental damage being done to the world, represented by one of my dad's VWs. With the fenders taken off, completely unironically I assume, to make it look 'junky'. Had no sense of anything, that father of mine; he used to serve, quite enthusiastically, on the local Conservation Commission, with no stirring whatsoever of consciousness or conscience, given the 55-gallon barrels of parts cleaner &c. he had rusting out in the yard.

And there I am, doing a job I surely did not volunteer for, with what can only have been a distinctly uncomfortable and crowdy flower headdress, holding a sign saying HELP.

Sums up my childhood quite prettily, doesn't it?

Learning

Here's the thing: we learn what we are taught.

I don't really know how to clean. This is not to be wondered at, I suppose, given that I was never really taught it, growing up in this hoarder's house: it's difficult, after all, to get in the habit of hanging your clean clothes in the closet when all the closets are stuffed full of your father's shirts.

But it's not just that. Living here again in my childhood home, even though my hoarding father is no longer here, I find that there are things I won't clean. My own room, and my new studio room (which used to be the guest room), are one thing, and even though I'm truly just not a particularly neat person by nature, they stay reasonably clean—I get my laundry done and change the sheets regularly, I have been known to vacuum, that kind of thing. But when it comes to say, the living room, or the kitchen? I won't touch them.

I think it is because it is shared space. And what I was taught growing up was that shared space, though supposedly 'shared', wasn't. It always belonged to my father. Or, I suppose, my mother, as she vehemently fought for her own space to breathe in this house. But not mine. Never mine.

And so I feel it is just not my place to clean shared spaces. That, on some level, I don't actually have the right. You should see me in other people's, friend's, kitchens: I would never just get up and make myself some food, and I even hesitate to put a dirty dish in the sink or the dishwasher, though I know it is the polite thing to do. Because I don't live there, and the place is not mine.

And then I realized that underneath it all is fear. I am actually afraid to clean someone else's space. As odd as that sounds, it is true.

It makes sense. Hoarders not only tend to take over all the available space, they are famous for freaking out if anyone else touches their stuff. If anyone touched any of my dad's crap while he was there, well, there'd be absolute Hell to pay. You could argue until you were blue in the face, and all you'd get was stubbornness and screaming, with a big helping of invalidation to go with it, for he'd yell that it was HIS STUFF and no one had ANY RIGHT to touch it. It was HIS, and HE PAID FOR IT, so he could do what he wanted with it. Which extended to anything he paid for, by the way, including the food on the table and the clothes we children wore. No one else's needs were valid, never mind important.

Under these conditions, attempting to clean was the equivalent to starting a war.

Is it any wonder I am frightened of cleaning?

We learn what we are taught.

Purge

Okay, I'm going to dive right in to what is arguably some of the nastiest stuff about growing up in a hoarder's house: the plumbing problems when I was growing up. Having bummed around with other children of hoarders recently I was shocked to find that plumbing problems were distressingly common. Because when something breaks in a hoarder's house, it does not get fixed. Either there is no money (an excuse, by the way, not necessarily a reality), or the hoarder can do it himself so won't let anyone else (but then never gets around to it, natch), or it's about some sort of mean-spirited control. All of the above, I think, in my father's case. At any rate it is rooted in the perverse perfectionism of the hoarder, or the person with OCPD; nothing can ever be done quite to the hoarder's standards, therefore nothing ever gets done.

First, let's make this clear, to myself, at least: it was not my fault. I was a child. The situation here was not, is not, and never will be a reflection on me or my character or worth as a person. It was humiliating, and embarrassing, and even sometimes physically dangerous, as well as something that was just not talked about. That kind of thing is so hard to bear, as a child, and as the adult who was that child (still is, in a lot of ways, unsurprisingly). But the bottom line is: it was not me. The responsibility lies entirely with my father. There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could have done to affect the situation. And trust me, I tried, even though I was a child.

Ugh. So. I will write as much of it as I can remember, here. As a purge, for my own health. Here goes:

When I was very young, young enough that the memory is a little hazy, the toilet didn't quite flush. At least I remembered that flushing the toilet was something the grown-ups did. I don't know quite what was wrong with the thing, but I'm pretty sure the grown-ups would periodically dump a pail of water in it to flush it. Which now of course makes me think it was something ridiculously simple—like a broken chain or the handle simply having come unattached. I wouldn't be surprised, you know.

There was supposed to be a toilet downstairs, too, in the crazy tiny little half-bath in the cellar; but that didn't get installed/working until I was out of college.

The faucets were spotty at best; I don't remember getting them all in working order till, honestly, I was in my thirties. The kitchen faucet, pretty much, did always work; but the bathtub, the upstairs bathroom sink, and the downstairs bathroom sink didn't, or only did so sporadically. If something leaked, my father just shut off the water to it. And then didn't fix it, and then, and this is key, wouldn't allow anyone else to fix it. On a couple of occasions when we got up the nerve to go against what he wanted, he would actually undo someone else's work.

There was no hot water here most of the time. (This automatically means that half the faucets didn't work, doesn't it?) There might have been when I was very young, but for pretty much all my school years there wasn't. Which meant:

That to get hot water for a bath it had to be heated on the stove and then brought upstairs (through several rooms) to the bathtub. When I was young I suppose my mother did it; but when I got to be a teenager I did it. Which means I was carrying pans of near to boiling water up a flight of stairs, through the piano room, through the living room, and through a hallway to the bathtub. And somehow (fear for my life, probably) I never spilled a drop. Even though the biggest (and so most useful one, as far as volume went) pan we had was some dump-picked thing with a broken handle, meaning on one side all I had to hold onto (with potholders) was the screw sticking out.

Someone somewhere along the line actually gave my father a water heater, a nice stainless steel number, which the original owner had had to get rid of since it was intended for a restaurant but didn't get the water quite hot enough to meet the board of health's standards for restaurant dish-washing. It was okay for a residential house, though, and so we got it. And then, of course, it sat there for years. There was always some reason for not installing it—the elements (it's an electric one) weren't quite the right size (and don't ask me how that worked, since as far as I know it was given him in working condition), or the entire house had to be re-plumbed before the thing could be installed. I remember great and incredibly frustrating arguments with my father where he absolutely insisted the pipes had to be done his way. They were copper, with brass fittings. But that was expensive and we didn't have the money. Or they had to be fitted together with the old-fashioned flare fittings, and they tended to leak, so he was the only one who could do it. Of course by that time the rest of the world had moved on to sweat-soldering copper pipes together, but my dad adamantly would not do that—what if he had to get into the pipe? Of course it's supposed to be a closed system and who the fuck needs to get into the pipes once it's all sealed off anyway?

The well tended to go dry in the summer, too. This is an old house—a 250-year old New England colonial, to be exact, and while it is itself a perfectly fine house, and quite excellently restored by, to give him credit, my father with the help from my grandfather, his father-in-law—the well is probably nearly as old as the house. If you look down it you can see it is not very deep, and is made of layers of stones set on top of each other, like the foundation of the house, and like the walls in the neighborhood. So it's quaint, I suppose. But often it was quite non-functional. We would go to the state forest up the street, where they had an artesian well, and fill milk bottles every few days in the summer.

And then there was the septic system. I am, frankly, embarrassed to talk about it because it was just so horrible. Like, puddle of horrible squishy stuff that no one wanted to acknowledge or deal with. Just mow around it. The grass around it was always really lush, of course, what with feeding on the raw sewage. And of course it smelled lovely, too. Only a very few select friends ever came over. Only one, for me.

I suppose this is a bit rambly, but it is what it is. Mainly it's about the absolute adamantine impossibility of my father, the amount of control he had over us, and the utter illogic of it all. There was no understanding it. He has always seemed to me to be completely opaque, and that one friend of mine, who was quite familiar with him, would get the same look of confusion and speechlessness I would when someone who didn't know him would ask us to describe him. Or it made no sense, at least, until I found out about OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. I spent so much time as a kid and young adult trying to talk to him. I learned all his patterns, and all the ways of getting him to open up just a little, and somehow I had the patience of a saint; but in the end it did little good. Really, I could probably qualify as a diplomat with all that practice. I mean, if I actually had any patience left for it, which I don't.

As for the state of the house now: I still live here, with Mom, who, though she will deny it, is 83 and could use a hand; and it's now all in good working order. Well, the faucet in the kitchen is a bit drippy but that just needs a washer or something, and it's a refreshingly ordinary problem, all told. Otherwise, all the faucets are hooked up, both toilets work, there is a lovely (courtesy of Tara one Christmas) new faucet with one of those old-fashioned looking hand-held shower head attachments in the tub, we have city water so the well is no longer an issue, and several years back we actually qualified for a grant to get a whole new septic system installed. When they put it in the guy with the bucket loader just matter-of-factly filled in the old horrible wet spot, then drove over it. In about a minute in a half, with heavy equipment. Bless him.

And bless us, myself and my sister and my mother, for enduring all of this. It was not our fault.

So Let's See

I suppose I should start off with some kind of overview of things, here. My father was a compulsive hoarder, born in 1923 and a child for the Great Depression. I say 'was', because, even though he is still alive, several years ago he had a stroke and now lives in a nursing home. He doesn't remember much. Perhaps that is just as well; he'd kill us if he could understand what we're doing to his 'stuff.'

My sister and I were born to either side of 1970; my father had, I think, already begun the hoarding before we were born. Although I, at least, am only just beginning to call it that, and recognize it as such: we just thought he was weird, or impossible, or hyper-controlling, or inscrutable or something. Nothing he did made any sense to me at all until I read about OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder.

Unlike many hoarders' houses the inside of ours was mostly okay. I mean, sure, he piled newspapers and magazines everywhere, took over all the closets and stuffed them full to bursting with new shirts with the tags still on them bought for 19¢ at Building #19, and kept talking about building more bookcases to put his ever-growing collection of cheapo books in (some of which were ones libraries had thrown away); but, for the most part, the house was livable. Well, perhaps I should put that in quotes, 'livable'. Since plumbing, um, irregularities were de rigueur growing up. But that's a whole 'nother post.

I really think the inside of the house only stayed somewhat okay because our mother fought him tooth and nail to keep it 'livable'. There was a lot of screaming going on in here growing up. I shudder to think how bad he would have let it get if left to his own.

But the yard. Yikes.

He was a mechanic, you see, who worked on the type of car I of course hate most in the world now: air-cooled Volkswagens. Once upon a time he had been employed by a dealership, but somewhere in there (and I'm not sure what led to it; there are stories of him being fired from the dealership on Christmas Eve) he decided he was going to do it from his own garage.

And that is why he began, or that is all the excuse he needed to begin, to collect cars. Volkswagens mainly, of course, but sometimes that didn't matter; if cousin so-and-so was done with his crappy Datsun pickup truck, why that might be useful, right? And not just cars, either, but car parts--engines, transmissions, tires, hoods, doors, seats, axles, anything and everything car related he saved. And when he ran out of space in the garage, he built a shop. When he ran out of space in the shop and it was getting difficult to work, he started another outbuilding. And so then of course he also saved building materials--scraps of plywood, boards salvaged from other buildings, moulding, doors, windows, rolls of linoleum, cedar shingles, tin cans full of nails.

There was more, of course. But Rage is tapping on my shoulder, so I'll stop there.

He's been in that nursing home for four years now; and though we've been cleaning it all up, it's still slow going. For one thing, one does not clean up forty years worth of crap overnight. For another, it is very heavy emotional work which brings up all kinds of nasty memories and sets all kinds of negative 'tape loops' playing in the head.

We have done quite a lot already, understand. At one point I believe (and Tara would know better than I) there were eighty-eight cars on the property. It is down to twenty-five now. We have cleared out space and reclaimed land, had innumerable tires taken away, brought carload after carload of iron to the scrap yard, filled bags and bags and bags of the fifty-five gallon heavy-duty trash bags, and even rented (and filled) a dumpster once: and there is still more. Just the other day Tara moved a pile of hoods aside and discovered several more stacks of tires. We brought another twenty-four of the things to a tire place last week and by today's count there are still at least sixty left.

So then, this blog. I have made it a goal to get the yard clean by the end of the year, before 2011 rolls in. And this blog will be a way to keep track of it all and to help us see the progress we have, and will, make. Expect lots of before and after shots.

Also it will serve as a place to vent our homicidal impulses, if for instance we uncover yet another fucking milk crate full of cedar shingles and carpenter ants. Consider it a service to society.