My relationship with material objects is somewhat fraught from my upbringing, from my family’s relationship with them. There’s trauma associated, passed down through my parents, particularly my father. My dad was a hoarder, and it extended beyond his own possessions. My mom, myself, and siblings often wanted to get rid of some of our personal things, things that weren’t his. And he often vetoed and told us and put them back where they “belonged.” 

Worse, sometimes he’d decide things needed to go and not consult us—it didn’t matter if we wanted to keep them because the items weren’t important to him. It was a strange thing growing up and a constant battle between him and my mom, wherein she would discover something missing and he’d admit he’d gotten rid of it, often by donating to charity but sometimes just throwing it away. Not that my mom was any better about getting rid of things without asking, which is how all my My Little Ponies, Barbies, and other childhood toys disappeared.

There were times he gave us a quota of how many items we had to donate to charity. I vividly remember a pile of toys in the hallway from one such purge. In the night, I “rescued” ones I really didn’t want to let go. I never saved all the ones I wanted and remember specifically over the years missing a dopey looking, stuffed, purple bird.

At first, we had the space for my dad’s hoarding, with a huge basement in a house with lots of storage space, a former farmhouse swallowed by the suburbs. We had a coal room converted in the 1950s to a bomb shelter, which we used for storage and a tornado shelter. My dad’s part of the basement was near the huge, black furnace, also installed sometime around the 1950s, which terrified us kids too much to venture near it. 

He was at that time constructing a long table meant to hold a permanent model train set with a landscape and everything. Dad was a railfan, and this was a common practice among his contemporaries. However, like a lot of projects my dad started (including my childhood dollhouse), it went uncompleted. Slowly, piles of stuff buried it.

Dad moved from collector to hoarder during the economic downturn in the early 90s. We didn’t so much move from my childhood home as have to sell it because our family couldn’t afford to pay the taxes. This was another sore spot for my dad; he had lost his job, not because of the economic downturn, but because he was a whistleblower. The company illegally ignored changes in law despite multiple memos written about the need to change certain policies. When it shifted from theoretical law-breaking to actual law-breaking, one that impacted other human beings, he did the right thing. He didn’t just lose his job, either—the industry blacklisted him. Only his tenacity got him back into it, but it took over a decade during which he worked multiple jobs for the family to survive. We went from upper middle class to food stamps. The loss of the house was a blow to him psychologically as a 1940s and 50s-raised breadwinner.

We moved to an actual farmhouse on a ten-acre plot with a smaller basement for his collection-turning-hoard to occupy. The table he constructed, which still had track screwed to it, remained piled with boxes never unpacked. 

My father was, my mom likes to say, the original nerd, the one made fun of in popular movies. When she met him, he wore mail-order polyester suits. He wore pocket protectors until he couldn’t find them anymore. All his shirts, even t-shirts, had to have a front breast pocket for this reason. He tried to hide the fact that he started going bald early by growing a lock of hair long and winding it over his bare scalp, setting it in place with a large amount of hairspray. This did not last long into their relationship once my mom introduced him to her hairdresser and Italian suits.

His collections were, at first, just another part of his nerdiness. He carted old Tom and Jerry and Donald Duckcomic books in a box his whole life, convinced they had value despite their lack of protection from the dank basements. He had an index-card drawer full of stamps and a small safe of collected coins. Any time new stamps came out that interested him, he’d buy a book for his drawer. He had tubs full of nails and screws that might be useful someday, as well as salvaged wall outlets and other sundries. He made sure to wear any gift, including the Sesame Street boxers I gave him as a joke one Christmas, with “Me Want Cookie,” “Tickle Me,” and “I Like Trash” emblazoned across the ass, until they fell apart at the seams.

As our economic situation continued, we moved again. He had half the basement, the unfinished part. The track was painstakingly unscrewed, and the table discarded. My still-unfinished dollhouse, the project abandoned at my childhood home after he embarrassed himself putting the siding on upside-down when I was seven, sat on a card table. 

“That just means it’s unique,” I told him when it happened, hoping to lift his spirits. 

It didn’t.

The dollhouse, like the train set, would never be completed. He barred me from playing with it because it wasn’t finished, so under the table in a box sat the collection of furniture, dolls, and other sundries I collected to furnish it. Ultimately, I gave it all to a cousin’s daughter, to be from Santa one year. I think Dad was a little devastated; for him, it was an acknowledgement of his failure.

After further difficulties, we moved a final time to a house with no basement, and my mom limited him to one room. She adopted a simple strategy at this point: anything he wanted to keep no one else wanted had to go in that room. Over the years, she would sneak things that were clearly garbage out to the curb in the night and pray he didn’t notice before he left for work the next day. Ripped clothing or sheets could be mended or used as rags, he insisted. Small appliances broken for months could be repaired—he’d do it later. Always later.

Now, you’d think with the dwindling space, he’d whittle away at the stuff. But it just became a more compressed hoard, one he added to continuously. On occasion, he’d let stuff go, but it was rare. He slowly lost control and moved from “collector” to “hoarder,” though it’s likely he was always the latter. In the end, it was almost impossible to walk through his “study.” There was only room enough to sit. Floor-to-ceiling. 

I was one of the only people who could convince him to get rid of anything, but I was choosy. Take the ragged, old rug in the living room crusted with filth, for example. Mom complained for months it made her sick. I visited for Christmas and mentioned it triggered my allergies, recommending he have it professionally cleaned. Within ten minutes, it was rolled up, placed and in the trash outside. Mom liked to say I had him wrapped around my little finger, but I think it was more about giving him control and options, making it a favor he did for me instead of a demand. I made sure to kiss him on the cheek and say, “Thank you, Daddy.”

When he died in 2016, he left the hoard to us. Some of it was valuable, given he was a life-long railfan who gathered documents and pictures; we donated that (per his wishes in his will) to a train museum. They established it as a collection in his name, the Stephen M. Scalzo Collection. I have a standing invitation to go there and finish the book he worked on his entire adult life. 

But we also killed his shredder two days after his death trying to shred over twenty years of paperwork he’d saved. I found an Ameritech phone bill from the 90s, from my childhood home. He organized some, but near the end, it was just stacks and stacks of junk. My mom tried to develop a system wherein they opened the mail on the dining room table and immediately put junk mail in the recycling bin. To avoid the shred pile getting too bad, she tore off the bits to shred and recycled the rest. He still insisted on “filing” every bill.

He was cremated the same day his shredder died. My mom insisted she needed to go and make sure it was his body they put in there. My immune system crashed from grief, and I ran a fever. I looked at the bags and bags of paperwork we could no longer shred and told my mom to burn it with him.

“That way he can be with his hoard for all eternity.”

My mother laughed so hard she both cried and peed her pants; dark humor has always been how we’ve dealt with stress. “You can either laugh or cry,” my mom likes to say, and we often wind up doing both.

She did not take his hoard of paperwork with her; instead, we burned it in the backyard firepit.

Some of what Dad saved was awesome. He’d printed out short stories and poetry I’d wrote that had since been lost in hard drive crashes. He kept my hand-written and cringe-worthy journals. He saved every savings bond we’d been gifted as kids; they had come to maturity in that time. We cashed them to take care of bills in the wake of his death. We found old art projects, things from school he saved. I found a paper on the geography of Jupiter’s moons I wrote as a high school freshman in 1996 or so.

My father had trouble communicating, particularly his emotions. Even on the phone, when I’d say, “I love you” at the end of our conversations, he would say, “okay!” in a boyish tone that ultimately became a joke between us. Saving these tidbits of our lives in his hoard, “collecting” bits of us hidden about his space, was his way of expressing love. I had accordion Redweld folders for each of us filled with things he’d saved—report cards, immunization records, school photo packages he’d squirreled away before we could give anyone else even one.

But the majority of it was a mess, and the room itself had black mold. Clearing the room took months. As the hoard disappeared, we uncovered the mold that made the space unbreathable. The train museum sent someone several times; every time we thought we found it all, we’d come upon another cache. The carpet had permanent groves and pressed in dust, dirt, and mold spores. The mold-infested wallboard was removed, the carpet replaced, the mold remediated, and the electric upgraded. Completely removing the hoard and all its consequences took over a year and was essentially a demolition project. 

Though my mom disagrees, I believe dad had psychological trauma, an ingrained survival mechanism that made no sense to us but perfect sense to him. Trauma haunts both sides of my family. My dad never spoke of his to me, but I heard stories of the psychological abuse he suffered as a kid into adulthood. For him, maybe the collecting, the hoarding, was an attempt to have control of a life he didn’t feel he had. In the early 2010s, when Mom and I watched the shows, Hoarders and Hoarding, he couldn’t stay in the room. He recognized himself in those people, but it was never an issue he could tackle.

I see signs of his trauma in myself; during one of my mental health crises, I became a hoarder. The most benign collection was stacks of books I purchased from local, used bookstores lining my apartment walls. I know I have the propensity to take after him, so I am on guard for what I must prune from my life.

-Emily Jo Scalzo

Emily Jo Scalzo holds an MFA in fiction from California State University-Fresno and is currently an assistant teaching professor teaching research and creative writing at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her work has appeared in various magazines including Midwestern Gothic, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Blue Collar Review, New Verse News, and others. Her first chapbook, The Politics of Division, was published in 2017 and awarded honorable mention in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards in 2018.