Why Stories Matter
Hoard: To hoard, a hoard…derived from Old English hordian, or hord, [and back through the ages of language from Germanic to Greek to Indo-European] from a word meaning a hollow, and certainly to hide.
So says my reliable Partridge’s Origins, by Eric Partridge, a linguist, prolific writer and veteran of Galipolli who worked at his same desk in the British Museum for 50 years and who published my well-used tome of etymology of words in 1958. I rely on it to capture the depth of an idea, because what are words but ideas handed down to us, with symbolism and pictures hidden in the backstory of the words we use. It’s why “words matter” as the saying goes.
It’s also why those who maintain the aphorism of life starting with “Sticks and Stones may break my bones…” never knew that words, because they are filled with symbols, pictures—and thus emotion— do hurt, and do so deeply, slicing through time and space and into bone, sinew, mind and heart to leave wounds festering for generations.
Hoard is one of those words that lasts through generations, being both a noun and a verb, it hurts and reveals, a stasis and an action, a condition and a hollow place filled with shame, inside and out, as in basements, rooms, apartments, houses, life. That house on the corner. That space packed with seeming useless Stuff that was formerly the living room or the garage, or the bedroom, but now filled to brim with stuff and shame. That person, beloved family member or stranger to point at, who hides in an inner hollow behind a door. And between them and the world is The Stuff.
I’ve wondered about the phenomenon of hoarding for years, looking nervously around my house as a writer, and as the one who was given family story, the one who was trusted with family secrets from individual family members, one by one, my home and life becoming a dusty confessional in which their hoard of lived experience, along with their valued Stuff, was entrusted and left before their passing.
Hoarding is never a choice, I’ve learned. Whether of story or of Stuff, it’s both a place and an action, and the one presiding over all of it sometimes the troll protecting the treasure, whether family story or things that “might someday have value”. I say this looking at the chests of photos of family members even my grandmother couldn’t remember who they were: “Somebody’s baby…” she’d laugh as we’d dig through large velvet photo albums carefully arranged when Victoria was queen and my grandmother’s mother was a newly arrived emigré to this country and this wilderness into which she came by choice at age 14, alone. Yes, alone. Arriving by train after taking a boat by herself at age 12 (allegedly, so the story goes; facts to yet be confirmed), to pause briefly with distant family and a dollar in her pocket in Ohio, and thence on train to an “Aunt who was somehow related to the family” so my grandmother (her eldest daughter) narrated. Fancy albums for one so impoverished on her arrival to a new life and a new world. But along with a teapot, she apparently dragged them along. The hoard of photos, even like a hoard as in a tribe or a people following her along in memory and in story, here they remain. And then their story to her daughter, and then on to me, a granddaughter who had time and interest while in the care of her old grandmother on quiet days without television, radio, or worldly noise. Another world appeared on those days, as we sat drinking tea from the same teapot (“It has a crack in the bottom so we have to drink it fast…”) the girl not much older than I was had carefully carried on the ship from Wales.
Oh but there are other hoards, some of my own making, some inherited. Papers of research for books yet to be written in boxes. Children’s toys left behind, exactly as they were left before those children, too, left for their own lives. A late friend called her hoard of children’s toys her “museum to childhood” in the attic where her own played, left untouched and unchanged as lives moved on. Hers also carried the memory of a son who died too young, unexpectedly just after he left home, so of course it was the place where he might still exist as remembered. Along with the toys and dollhouses, balls and pennants was a hoard of grief. I get it.
Then there are the hoards of those we shake our heads at, in judgement meant to keep us out of their mess. The ones filled or emanating some sort of shadow that needs to be exhumed or exorcised. These often need the help of a professional. God forbid a well-meaning family member throws it out as a “help”, because it is a hollow, shadowed place of woundedness and trauma.
“It feels like throwing a piece of Self — dreams, hopes, interests in life — out.” said a hoarder when describing the pain of the clean up. “It’s like amputating an arm or a leg.” And the impulse to hoard, they now say, comes from hurt, fear, trauma to create safety (control?), stability, always having what one needs when a human has been frightened (as an adult or a child) in not having ‘enough’ of whatever the hoard-treasure is.
And the remedy, so said this expert, is to listen to the story of the items in the hoard, to help process the hurt, the wound, the loss, the trauma in this present moment. Story is so important. Would that we had time to sit and listen and care and yet to not be overwhelmed by it all.
As an experiment, after embracing the boxes of photos and “antique stuff that might someday have value” (truer words never spoken), the dear memory and the raw emotion carried therein, I ran through a list of family hoards — a set of rooms and Stuff about which they felt such shame unspoken, I realize now that each and all are gone and I left to process or toss or both.
Beyond the portraits of unknown relatives from Victoria’s reign and of a vast western prairie, buried underneath are antiques of someone else’s family that my mother inherited when she bought their summer cabin (beware of properties that offer all the interior contents along with the property at sale!) there were hoards of relics from other people’s dreams, joys, and hopes. A set of original Disney glasses from the many children who seemed to enjoy the cabin that became our family place too. A coffin flag from a son lost at sea in WWII. All left behind because the elderly couple selling it saw value in it or maybe just couldn’t process it on their own.
But there were more hoards I realized, more story, within my own family each left behind as I take mental inventory of lives and times now forever past, relics of the wounding and chaos hoarders try to use to both create stability and security, pieces of their lives and their past around them.
My father left a full closet of jackets, hoarded to heal wounds of a time of his life as a young boy in the Depression and poverty of Arkansas, where he went without a winter coat that fit his tall, skinny frame for depressing Depression years as a lad. He related the story to me when I was a child. Each jacket in the closet was literally a wrap of reliability and security to ward away ever again being that cold, that hungry, or that uncertain of what tomorrow might bring for a young child, relegated to eating strawberries from a field he was picking for a penny. His story was sweet as the berries: the owner of the field allowed the children picking to eat as much as they could while working for a penny because he knew none had enough to eat in 1930. I was beneficiary of his childhood hurt as he made sure I always had a jacket that fit, winter to winter.
Another family member, his mother, hoarded jars of jam on her overflowing kitchen shelves. Always a choice of sweetness and plenty there, as a child I’d never seen so many jars of jam purchased weekly from the Safeway as “necessity”, especially when the cupboard was already packed full . But listening to the story told by my father (in bits; he was too ashamed of their poverty to talk much about it at one sitting) I understood as an adult the laden shelves warded and wrapped away the lack of sweetness in life of her own as the youngest of 10 girls abandoned by her father in her childhood, followed by the dashing of her young-woman dreams by the poverty lived thru the Depression.
Her husband, my grandfather, left a secret with me — that he had but a 4th grade education and no one in the family could ever know this, such was his hollowed-out shame of having no education– along with a hoard of jars of bolts, screws, nuts, string, metal wire. It was a lifetime-plus supply of items needed to fix things (as if things could ever be fixed when in the past) after a lifetime of seeking lasting work as a typesetter, living hand to mouth, job to job, until my father managed to buy them a house of their own in their late ’70s. My grandfather hoped, with his hoard of fix-it items, that they would never again lack for the things needed to fix whatever broke — everything, that is, but the poverty itself that broke his spirit. In his last years, lost to dementia, he spent his days sorting and remixing the items in the jars, ever looking for the one thing he needed to fix…? It was heartbreaking. But he healed his secret by reading an entire Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia series he’d bought at the Safeway, 49 cents at a time for each book, as his education before his brain broke under the strain and tangle of disease. His healing of life before so cruel an illness was in hoarded reading, as the Bible had been one of but three treasured books he learned to read and own until the F/W set came along. The bookshelf he left me still holds his Sherlock Holmes anthology, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positivee Thinking (oh the irony), and of course, his Bible. What a mind he must have had to be able to both set type and spell correctly upside-down and backwards for his trade as printer, despite his lack of schooling.
But as with any family of curious, creative people, books, and the information inside was a good, treasured honorable hoard. For knowledge is what makes a person rich, despite external circumstances and the eternal hope that the other piles of Stuff will have dollar value someday. I was taught that hoarding books bore no shame but instead gave meaning and value in the words and ideas inside. Books were treasure, a true hoard, according to my grandmother, who read to me from her treasured Christmas gifts of one-book-each-year as a girl, and included tomes by Tennyson, Wordsworth and Whitman. When she wrapped them with a thin slip of ribbon and gifted them to me on a Christmas when I was 13, I cried. She had gifted me three books in one year — her treasured hoard in one small pile.
My grandmother — the same one with whom I slurped quick cups of tea before it leaked out the bottom of the teapot — also hoarded piles of newspaper clippings along with her books. They were items of useful information regarding health, as she had had to somehow help her daughter survive a bout of Scarlet Fever (resulting of a basic “Strept-throat”) when my mother was a young child and no antibiotics yet invented. That was after burying her own young mother after she died of a mysterious woman-ailment (cancer of the uterus) for which there was no cure and after surviving her own childhood illnesses in the middle of nowhere with no doctor within 40 miles and then only by wagon. My grandmother’s piles of health information, sent along in little envelopes with a tucked-in dollar-bill while I was living her dream of attending university, were her reminders of the wounding of “without your health you have no life”. It was a way to care for my brother and me in absentia, a careful clipping from ages-old newspapers with information how to ward off and heal the next unknown disease. I realize now after Covid19+ how wise her information was.
Similarly her dear neighbor hoarded entire newspapers in her tiny 400 square foot house — a subscription she and my grandmother shared because neither could afford a subscription of their own. Why just read a newspaper once when it could be shared and enjoyed again by a neighbor? When this lovely old woman moved away to be near family at age 100, just 2 years after my grandmother left this earth and left me with the basement hoard of photos and teapots and clippings, her neighbor’s house was left full to the window-frames with stacks of newspapers, pathways through them, of all the news she felt it important to keep. I wondered at pathways leading from door to living room to bedroom when a child; now that I understand more about the hoarding impulse (need?) I wonder if she were looking for the news of her husband and family lost in WW1 or WW2, as a newly arrived German immigrant. Or whether as a teacher by trade, she was always learning in order to teach what is important to a new generation, because she was publicly an incredible “font” of information. No one knew her font runneth over inside her little house ’till she passed away. Well, no one but me and my grandmother because we were allowed to visit ‘inside’ the hoard. We were allowed to see her piles of papers and her efforts to wrap her solitary life in information and in news of…? Whatever she had been wounded by and healing from, whatever piece of her Self and Soul the news represented, I’ll never know and I don’t know if she could even explain it.
That’s just it, isn’t it? We don’t always know what stability we seek, or trauma we are wrapping away in stuff, what memory we try to hold onto, what piece of Self we stash and hide to feel safe from the time when life hurt so much. Stuff to cushion the hollow feel inside when others shake a head at the hoard and the shame at the need we feel within still for stability, security, having enough.
Having Enough to not hurt anymore. That’s it basically. A piece of Self, of hopes, dreams, interests…
Telling the story of each piece of Self is the only healing there is, say the experts, if one can be lured out of hiding, out of the hollow of shame within, to shine a light on the wounded Self, and tell another soul the importance of what we hold onto so dearly. Then it is a hoard of true treasure for within the story is the Self, the unique and shining Soul in this shadowed, shaming, harsh world.
That’s why Story matters.
Every story.
Every one’s story.
Earth: Sacred/Possession 