Stuffitis

A couple months ago, our next-door neighbor was moving out of the house she shared with her grandparents and asked if Arnon and I would help her move a few pieces of furniture into the moving van. We happily agreed but regretted it the moment we stepped into her house.

Allah be alarmed, what a freaking nightmare! The grandparents had lived in the house for nearly six decades and from the looks of things, they had never thrown out a single item.

Every room was crowded with excess furniture, and each piece of furniture was piled high with all sorts of junk. In the tiny living room there were three couches and a queen-sized bed, half a dozen lamps, four tables and a recliner. There was a fourth couch but it had already been moved out.

There were giant (and by giant I mean taller than five feet) oxygen tanks (all empty) in just about every room, Jehovah's Witness reading material scattered all over the place, cat food and dog hair on every surface, black mold on grouted areas, and of course the usual layers of dust and cobwebs.

The kitchen was carpeted and we discovered large patches of black mold growing on it when we moved the fridge. But that was nothing compared to the mold inside the fridge. I was asked to move the food in the fridge (much of it long spoiled) into the fridge inside the garage, which was even grosser than the one inside the house.

As for the smell, let me just describe it as a combination of old-people-odor (four old people to be exact), mold, cat pee, wet dog, dirty laundry and dust. The grandmother told me that the last time the house was vacuumed was over twenty years ago! Quel horror!

I've mentioned before that I used to be a serious pack rat, but even at my worst I didn't have as much junk as my neighbors do in just one corner of a room.

Ronell, another neighbor who came to help, asked me why these people, who are clearly religious, spent so much time and energy accumulating and storing material goods as though they would live on this earth forever when they should have been focusing on more spiritual matters. I didn't have an answer then and I don't have one now.

One positive thing that came out of this experience was that Arnon and I realized how easy it is to become lazy and sentimental and end up with a house full of useless crap, so we vowed not to become like our neighbors. Unfortunately, in the two months since we made that vow, we've let a lot of junk come into our home and they're sitting in piles all over the place.

So much for our lofty declarations that we would be vigilant in our fight against stuffitis.