When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see all the this-and-thats stacked high against the windows where the curtains didn’t cover, all the way up to a shipstyle porthole on the second floor. The overall impression was that the cabin sloshed nearly to its brims with things.
Her airstream out front was full of dressers and armoires. Her backyard was like a sculpture garden for the partially broken mundane. A trampoline. Odds and ends of lumber. Stacks of salvaged tile. She told me once that she was storing six clawfoot bathtubs. Sometimes, she’d find a dress or a pair of pants she thought would strike my fancy, load it into a salvaged plastic grocery bag, and hang it from my gate latch for me to find when I came home from work.
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Re-running this piece as a reminder for all of us to appreciate even our fowl-est friends. (See what I did there?)
