[originally posted July 17 2011, 10:58 AM]
I visited my father who has mild dementia.
...oh, and hoarding.
My brain was swimming in war metaphors this weekend as I engaged the battlefield of safety hazards that is the upstairs of his house. Dad has been frugal, saving every empty detergent and juice bottle, every fast food receipt, every plastic shopping bag, and every broken scrap of industrialized society he encountered. There is only a solitary mouse living among this treasure trove, so he apparently is emptying the crumbs and rinsing the juice bottles.
So, in effort to reduce the clutter (there's a reason for that, more on that later...), I attacked the upstairs this weekend. It was daunting. My first strategy was to "take that hill", a throwback to the Korean War. I saw an unused electical outlet behind a 5 foot high stack of hoarded stuff. My goal: clear the tabletop, fix the outlet, so we could later get rid of the rat's nest of old extension cords criss-crossing the landscape like barbed wire from No-Man's-Land in The Great War.
I acheived my mission after hauling away numerous large trash bags, only to find an empty machine gun nest. The outlet was dead.
So, as our leaders did during the VietNam War, I shifted my measure of success to "body counts". In all, I hauled away 10 bags of trash.
No, the enemy didn't surrender. We have no armistice. There is no change in the forward line or the DMZ. The air is still filled with electricity ... from the maze of old extension cords.
But I did not walk away defeated.
... or empty-handed.