Читать книгу Ordinary Sins - Jim Heynen - Страница 11

THE HOARDER

And for years people thought she was simply a collector!

That was before they started counting: 550 coffee cups, some in cupboards, some on tables, some on bookshelves, and some dangling on hooks. Bathrobes might be a great comfort on a chilly morning, but twenty-three of them? Eighteen ice cream scoops? And two little teddy bears on every step leading upstairs? Collecting knickknacks is not unusual, but a dozen shoeboxes bulging with tiny owls? And what’s in all the bigger boxes stacked along the walls? You can’t even see out the windows.

By the time it was obvious the hoarder was more than a collector, no one knew what to say. The last person who visited found a narrow path from the front door into the other rooms. Then she stopped allowing visitors because there was no place for them to sit if they did manage to find the path from one room to the next.

The hoarder had enclosed herself with stuff. Teetering stacks and mounting mounds. She was practically smothering herself.

Or was she?

She’s sort of like a caterpillar making a cocoon, someone said.

Single-minded in her mission, she went on filling the remaining gaps bit by bit, knitting herself in tighter—eagerly, like one who was preparing for that glorious warm day when the world would burst open around her and she could fly into the unencumbering sky on wings of many colors.