Background of cardboard boxes inside warehouse, logistic center. Warehouse filled with cardboard boxes. Mess in the warehouse. 3D illustration
When my cousin decided to move house, I thought it would be a simple operation: pack, load, move, unpack, done.
I regretted the moment I offered my assistance once I realised that I severely underestimated two things: the power of a hoarder’s attachment to objects and the sheer volume of stuff one human can collect when left unchecked.
We started in the living room. I picked up a cracked teacup. There was no saucer.
“Trash or keep?” I asked. “Keep,” she said immediately. “That was the cup I was drinking from the day my puppy barked at the postman for the first time. Very sentimental.”
I sighed and tried again with a faded magazine from 1997.
“This?” “Definitely keep. That has an article predicting hoverboards by 2005. Historically important.”
By the time we got to the bedroom, I was knee-deep in plastic shopping bags, each carefully folded, labelled and filed away like they were national treasures.
When I suggested maybe we didn’t need all 462 of them, she gasped like I’d proposed burning down the Louvre.
The kitchen wasn’t a better prospect. She had two blenders, one for smoothies and one for nostalgia, because it was the first electrical item she ever bought.
The fridge contained sauces so old they should’ve been carbon-dated. Tinned food without labels, but luckily not yet expired, were stacked knee-high.
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Her reason for keeping them: “It is like opening a Christmas cracker. You never know what is inside until you pop the lid.”
Eventually, I tried logic. “If we move everything, the moving truck will collapse under the weight. We have to be selective.”
Her solution? “We’ll just get two trucks.”
By day three, the movers had joined me in my silent despair. One of them whispered, “Madam, she just packed a rock. A friggin’ rock.”
Sure enough, there it was, carefully wrapped in bubble wrap.
“That’s from my first walk to the corner shop in 1983,” she explained.
Finally, after hours of negotiations that would put the United Nations to shame, we managed to smuggle out a single box of things to donate.
It contained … one bent spoon. And even that, she insisted, was “with deep regret”.
The day ended with two trucks loaded to the brim. As we pulled away, she looked around wistfully and said, “You know, I’ll miss this place. It has such good storage space.”
I think I aged 10 years in that move.
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