Rewriting the Clutter

Rewriting the Clutter

by Madi A. 03/2026

The History

Her mother was born in a rural farming area during the Depression, a time when everything they had was precious. Her grandfather was a logger in northern Quebec when he met her grandmother, who worked as a cook for the logging camp. After they married, they had eight children. Though they often faced severe deprivation, her parents remained self-sufficient, working the land to provide for their needs.

Her father was born on a farm in northern Ontario. His father, born in New Brunswick in the late 19th century, was a military man who served in World War I (WWI). Upon his return, he purchased a farm in northern Ontario and worked the land. His mother was born at the dawn of the 20th century; she was a homemaker who raised ten children and dedicated her life to cooking, cleaning, and baking.

While both lineages shared common roots, they produced a generation defined by thrift and resourcefulness. The "waste not, want not" lifestyle was firmly established. Because those born in the early 1900s often had to help their families survive, many children, including her mother, faced interrupted schooling, delaying both their education and their entry into the workforce.

Her Family Home

Her parents met and married in the mid-1950s. Her father was an educated man who worked as an accountant at a local firm. Her mother, whose schooling had been cut short, worked in retail as a clerk in the jewelry industry.

Soon after marrying, they purchased a modest home in the suburbs of a northern city. A few years later, they had two children: a girl and a boy. Having worked from a young age, her mother kept herself busy by taking on commissioned sewing work.

Where Her Hands Touched

She remembers, as a young girl, the sewing machine set permanently on the kitchen table, with supplies spread across the counters. Every mealtime, the workshop had to be cleared to return the space to a dining area. Eventually, her mother began drawing and soon traded her pencil for a paintbrush, and she became an accomplished artist, taking commissions for her oil paintings. Supplies began to accumulate throughout the 850-square-foot home. While both children had their own rooms, the space was tight. The unfinished basement became a catch-all for anything that didn’t fit upstairs.

Being a passionate crafter, her mother viewed the consumption of supplies as a necessity for her work. This created a fine line between a crafter requiring materials and a hoarder collecting them. It became difficult to distinguish the hobby from the habit.

One symptom of hoarding is the development of an emotional attachment to materials. Soon, her mother’s creativity was being overtaken by consumption. New hobbies were added: paper tole, crochet, knitting, and porcelain doll making. There was no denying her talent, but the volume of materials was growing.

The Excess

The basement was eventually finished and remodeled into a recreation room, including the welcome addition of a second bathroom. However, the hoarding became more apparent shortly after. The sewing workshop moved to the recreation room, where boxes of supplies soon lined the walls.

Her mother insisted that more cabinets and shelving were needed. Her father tried to help by building storage, intending to help the crafter organize, but in reality, he was feeding the need to hoard. For years, this was the cycle: needing supplies for commissions and starting new projects before finishing the old ones.

The solution wasn't more storage; it was a purge. A "three-category rule" (keep, donate, trash) should have been implemented, but her mother was too emotionally attached to her belongings. The cycle of wanting to complete projects while buying more supplies created a never-ending loop that no longer made financial or practical sense.

The Transition

She tried to help her mother by encouraging her to reduce consumption and finish projects with the materials already on hand. There needed to be a shift in mindset, but for it to work, the decision to declutter had to be her mother’s. To avoid anxiety, words like "junk" or "trash" were avoided, as they acted as triggers. The focus was placed on safety, ensuring paths were clear and fire hazards were removed.

Years went by. The crafter crafted, the hoarder hoarded, and the shopaholic shopped.

After her father passed away, the house had to be sold. The 850-square-foot home was filled to the rafters. As she prepared to move her mother to a new home, she strategically helped her select only the essentials.

Room by room, she applied the "three-category rule". It took months of daily work to clear the house and the garage. She realized then that her parents had also kept the majority of the contents from their cottage, as well as items from her grandmother’s estate. She was physically and emotionally sifting through several generations of belongings. She felt the weight of it all, sorting, recycling, and storing, trying to beat the onset of winter to sell the house.

A Lifetime of Stuff

The storage unit was supposed to be a temporary solution, a pause button hit during the chaos of selling the house. Instead, it became a ten-year sentence for a graveyard of "someday" projects and "just in case" supplies.

Even with a steady rhythm of trips to the dump, the room remained stubbornly full. It was a physical manifestation of the hoarding cycle that had merely moved from the 850-square-foot house to a cold, metal locker. The weight of it was compounded by the silence of the next generation, leaving her as the sole judge, jury, and executioner of her parents' belongings.

The guilt of the "footprint" she was leaving behind at the local landfill weighed as much as the boxes themselves. She found herself disposing of the remnants of her mother’s intense creative eras: loads of porcelain doll molds, slip, and supplies, bins upon bins of potential that would never be realized.

Then there were the paintings. There seem to be hundreds of oil canvases, the fruits of her mother's "accomplished artist" years, sitting in the dark. In a world where no one seemed to want the physical evidence of another person's hobby, she was faced with the heartbreaking task of deciding which few would be saved. Out of thousands of items, she could only name five things she actually wanted to keep for herself. The rest was just "stuff", a lifetime of accumulation reduced to a heavy heart. She was storing the evidence of a life lived with a constant fear of “not having enough”.

The Hidden Treasures

Despite the decade of soul-crushing trips to the landfill, the storage unit held more than just forgotten hobbies. It held the anchors of her heritage.

These five treasures are not “supplies”; they are the map of the family archive.

Within all the bins of porcelain doll molds and lots of oil paintings that no one wanted, she struck gold. She found her grandmother’s mid-1950s Singer sewing machine, still seated in its original table. It was the very machine that had hummed through the Depression and the post-war years, the engine of the "waste not, want not" era.

Even more profound was the discovery of her grandfather’s WWI compass. A small, brass instrument that navigated him back to a farm in northern Ontario.

Some old family albums from the 50s and 60s, and the old 8mm reels of her own childhood, fragile memories to digitize for the future generation.

A set of two oil lamps from her grandmother's farmhouse. They once held the light for a generation that survived the Depression.

Three exquisite prints from the 1940s by A. Roux: her grandfather in his WWI uniform, her grandmother, and her father as a boy of ten.

In a room filled with the "excess" of life, these were the "essentials." They were the artifacts that survived the "three-category rule" without question. The world saw only a footprint at the dump. She held in her hands the tools of her ancestors: one for creation, and one for direction.

She realized then that the ten years of storage fees weren't just for the "clutter." They were the ransom she had paid to rescue these few pieces of her soul.

The "Why"

For years, we viewed her accumulation of supplies as a passionate crafter’s habit, but in fact, it was the earliest, quietest warning sign of Frontotemporal Dementia. The disease was quietly eroding the very parts of her brain responsible for executive function: the ability to judge the value of an object, the capacity to organize, and the impulse control to stop "collecting."

While we once labelled her behaviour as hoarding, it was, in truth, a symptom of a mind losing its grip on the ability to categorize the world. The "three-category rule" that should have been an easy task became an impossible mountain for her to climb. Her brain could no longer process the difference between an essential tool and a piece of trash; to her, everything was "potential", and everything was "precious".

Knowing this doesn't make the storage unit any easier to clear, but it changes the "why" of the story. It turns the hoard from a stubborn personality trait into a disease. It explains why the cabinets and the shelves never helped, because the person who needed them was no longer able to use them to organize her life.

Trigger a Moment in Time

As her mother just turned 95, she now resides in long-term care. She is her primary caregiver, visiting her as often as she can. To help her anchor herself to her identity and the life she once lived, she has created large-scale photo collages of her major milestones, which hang on her walls. She also designed personalized photo placemats featuring her parents’ travels; she brings these to the dining room to fill the silence of mealtime with familiar scenes. Even if these prompts trigger only a one-second flash of recognition, a happy moment, she considers the effort a success.

Finally, to honor her mother's legacy as an accomplished artist, she used an AI application to convert family photos into custom, printable coloring pages. During her visits, she sits with her mother and her granddaughter, and together they color. Often, she asks for guidance on which colors to use, which provides the perfect opening to retell the stories behind the images, the “who, where, and what” of her family history. Each time they color together, her goal remains the same: if she can spark even a single second of memory, if she can help her reach back and grasp a moment captured in time, then all the work has been worth it.

From a young girl living through the Depression on a farm, to a wife of nearly six decades, a mother of two, a grandmother of three, and a great-grandmother of five, she lived a rich and full life as an accomplished artist. Even at 95, she still uses her iPhone to stay connected with loved ones. She has retained her original phone number for over sixty years. Every day, she connects with her out-of-town son using FaceTime on her iPad, and finds comfort in the endless scroll of photos of a life well-lived.

Every visit, she spends time with her mother, whether by coloring photo pages, playing a game of Skip-Bo, or simply being there with a listening ear, agreeing with the conversation of the day. When it’s time to leave, her mother is tired. As she says her goodbyes, she always ends with, “See you soon, Mom.” One day, it may be the last one. Her mother pushes her walker towards the fourth-floor window and says, “I’ll wave when I see you!” As she drives down the driveway at the front of the building, she stops at the second last window to the right, opens her car window and waves back.