My Grandmother hoards paper towels. She has been purchasing them for decades and although she does use them regularly, she will never in her lifetime use them all. She has rolls of paper towels stacked up to the ceiling of one room of her house and continues to buy more so she won’t run out. She will never run out, in fact, her entire family could do their paper towel “shopping” in her home and she would still never run out. But my Granny needs her paper towels and “no” is not an option.
She lived through the great depression where people had virtually nothing and what little they had was saved, used very carefully, hoarded and protected. She lives with that mind-set to this day. Toilet paper is another storage problem. She will never run out of that either. Her bathroom has a closet in it that is full of nothing but toilet paper from floor to ceiling, and I would bet that the rolls on the very bottom have been there since 1978.
Recently, we cleaned out one of her bedroom closets and found a stack of facial tissues left over from 1966 and 1976. I can remember using those items back when I was a little kid. We are using the remains of them today, some 30 years plus later. We also found a suitcase that had been packed since 1974, complete with medications she had been taking back then and her toiletries, some of which were as hard as rocks. But the point was, she was ready for anything. If her house had burned down, she was ready. If a tornado came through, she was ready. She was ready that is, if she could find the actual suitcase in the first place, which was highly unlikely since she had long since forgotten its existence.
Food is purchased the same way, over-abundantly, and stored either in her freezer, where it eventually becomes part of the internal glacier, never to be chipped loose again in a million years, or in her pantry in the basement, where old canned goods go to die. She never looks at them again, but she feels secure in the fact that they are there. My Granny only weighs 90-some pounds, so it’s quite obvious that with her appetite she will never require that much food, but in her mind, it just doesn’t matter. It’s there, and that’s that. Someday, Archeologists may find her stash and wonder what kind of army was kept there.
All in all, however, life goes on at Granny’s house, and at 90 years plus, she can probably get away with being as eccentric as she pleases. Don’t we all wish we had it so good?
