“…I wonder if there are still plastic bag hoarders and washers out there. I am just interested to know if anyone has any insight as to the reasons for hoarding and cluttering.”
As someone who was raised by immigrant parents, I can offer one perspective on the “plastic bag hoarders.” My parents lived through a war, a war which the country of their birth lost. As school children, part of their school day consisted not of studying, but of growing food to eat. Books were hard to come by, as were clothes. My mother had an aptitude for sewing, and cloth that came to the family was sewn into clothes for her younger siblings, and for relatives. How different life was, a mere 60 years ago. If I want a shirt, I go to a store. If one of my mother’s family members wanted a piece of clothing back then, a bolt of cloth had to have been acquired (or another item of clothing taken apart) and my mother would construct something new with a Singer sewing machine which was a luxury item that the other relatives did not have. So they really tried to take care of their clothes back then.
Years later, in the U.S. my parents worked on a farm, eventually started their own farm. They managed their finances well.
My deep involvement with the family affairs didn’t start until I hit my early 20s when my parents were getting older. When my father had a stroke he needed even more help. I took it upon myself to go through all the paperwork. I found bank and business records, dutifully packed away by my father, going back far beyond any IRS requirement. Nothing untidy, nothing that ever hurt their business. My father was very organized, and had developed his own system for getting things done. He put much thought into his system over the years, and would design his workspace to his liking. For instance, he liked putting things in cubbyholes, so he would construct them out of steel shelving.
It was just that nothing was ever thrown away. He would simply buy more file cabinets, and more file boxes, year after year. Nothing had an expiration date. Living on a farm, storage space was not a problem. However, I did some research to find out what needed to be kept, and for how long, got the green light from a couple of trusted sources, and I started to take care of the backlog, with the involvement of my father. A huge amount of old records were shredded, and I was able to take care of this while my father was still alive, and with his full support. It was a bonding experience, as I learned how he thought, and why he did things the way that he did.
When he passed away, the paperwork style changed to suit my style rather than his, because I now had to do the work. Over the years, I incorporated some of his procedures, added a few of my own, and am now reaching the point of being an almost paperless business. No more cardboard file boxes. Five banks of file cabinets gone. No more cubbyholes. Three banks of steel shelving recycled for scrap metal. But…I keep his pencil holders, which he constructed by nailing small tin cans of varying sizes to a little blocks of wood. He’d even gone to the trouble of painting the wood block with spare paint. Cute! But it’s not the pencil holder, but my current system, which is one of my father’s many legacies to me.
As for my mother, she engages in the plastic bag washing behavior. I see many people do this, particularly her generation. I don’t think the motivation for doing this is to harm other members of the household or to cause them mental distress. I don’t think there’s anything pathological about the behavior. I think the motivation is to try to do the right thing, by squeezing out the useful life of an item. From an ecological point of view, this is not a bad practice. Yes, theoretically these are recyclable, yes we can always buy more, but it’s also a fact that not all recyclers even want the plastic bags. So a frightening amount of these wind up in landfill.
Apart from that, my big complaint about the plastic bag thing is that these are very difficult to clean, so I don’t want my mother to spend her diminishing energy on such an activity. But she doesn’t want to toss things into the recycling can after using the item only one time. My imperfect solution for this is to try to encourage the use of those plastic containers that look like much thinner and easier to handle versions of Tupperware instead of using plastic bags. They are stackable, they fit in the fridge, they are see through, they are easy to wash and reuse. They satisfy her desire to reuse items, and the recycling can doesn’t fill up with ziplocks. A win-win.
I really think family can help each other out and I feel sad for people who are left alone and widowed and don’t have that help readily available when they are older.
In an ideal situation, family can share the burden of household duties. The people who have the mental and physical energy to take things to the recyclers can help out the older folk who don’t have that kind of energy. The people who have an affinity with paperwork can help out those that have difficulty with it. I don’t mind going to the recycler. I like doing laundry. I like doing paperwork. I like cleaning house. I don’t like to cook, and if I didn’t have to do it, would likely eat only rice and soup for the rest of my days. On the other hand, my mother is quite good in the kitchen, and it is therefore well stocked. She frequently cooks for potlucks, for funerals, for sick friends. It’s quite admirable, and I can’t criticize her for the accumulation of plastic and paper bags from grocery shopping, or the inevitable growing collection of empty glass bottles of items that she’s used up. The least I can do is to keep those items at a reasonable low number by taking things away to the recyclers at regular intervals.
If I notice that things are being repurchased because she didn’t see that she already had it, I start to think about how to make that a little easier for her. She’s not getting any younger, and in looking at the kitchen, although she has plentiful cabinet space, I have to set things so that they are at her eye level, and pretend that those higher cabinets or lower cabinets don’t exist, because they are now inaccessible to her. So I’ve been emptying those spaces.
For similar reasons, a couple years ago, I emptied her attic crawl spaces. There’s simply no way she will ever be able to go up there again, and I don’t want to have to go up there often either, so no reason to use that space even for long term storage. So everything came down, was evaluated, and either left the house, or was incorporated into ground level storage.
The house and the farm is evolving. It’s a long process of not only uncluttering, but having our spaces fit life as it is now. It’s necessary to be willing to change our surroundings to reflect our current lives. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the way it was. There was nothing wrong with my parents buying things that they enjoyed with the money that they are earned. Nothing wrong with buying books, clothes, etc. Nothing wrong with my father’s bank of file cabinets. At the time, all that made sense, and that was fine. Things were bought. Things were used. Eventually they were no longer needed. I’m trying to release all the items that are now past being useful to us.
I enjoy thinking about things like this. Maybe I’m the one with a pathology….
