People of the Neighbourhood : The hoarder

For years, it was the neighborhood’s dark curiosity. We all knew the house, infamous for its stubborn decay. The front window was choked by a high rack of dusty beer glasses, wrapped in layers of decades-old cobwebs. You couldn’t see inside. On the rare occasions the front door swung open, it revealed a hallway packed to the ceiling with banana boxes. Even when shut, the house breathed: the small transom window in the middle the door remained permanently ajar, winter and summer, exhaling a heavy, musky scent of mold and forgotten decades onto the pavement.

Every now and then, we saw him—the collector of this chaos. A silent man, endlessly rearranging cardboard boxes balanced precariously on the two or three old bicycles that cluttered the sidewalk.

Then, in September 2023, the authorities stepped in. A black official notice was slapped onto the brickwork: Uninhabitable. To be honest, the inspection shouldn’t have come as a surprise; a small sapling had literally taken root in the mortar of the top floor, its green leaves waving from the brickwork like a brave proof that nature was taking over this home from civilisation. 

The bikes vanished. The man disappeared. I felt a pang of pity for him, wondering where a man goes when his fortress of cardboard is taken away.

But houses like that don’t die quietly. For the next two years, the beer glasses stayed in the window, and the transom remained open. And then, the mystery deepened. If you passed by at just the right hour, you would see a neighbor from four doors down slipping through the entrance, carrying a fresh, full loaf of bread. It triggered a flurry of silent questions: Was someone still hiding in the shadows? Was the hoarder surviving on bread alone? Or was there a secret menagerie of chickens or birds in the overgrown back garden that still needed feeding?

Last year, the inevitable happened. A "For Sale" sign appeared. The sapling on the top floor was gone, and also the top window had been gone, replaced by a cheap plastic shield. It felt like an impossible sale. Who would have the courage to buy a condemned hoard? Who could look at that moldering brickwork and see a future? Who had the capacity to see the potential of this wreck?

Apparently, a couple did.

A few weeks later, a bold "SOLD" sticker was slapped across the sign. Suddenly, the neighborhood held its breath. The rack of cobwebbed beer glasses was cleared away. The hallway got emptied. What a different sight!  For the first time in memory, light pierced through the front room, all the way from the garden doors at the back with all the stuff getting removed.  I could see oxygine flowing through the house.

And then, the ultimate sign of life appeared. Someone had cleared a small patch of dust on the front window and scribbled three words: A home in the making ...J&W.

I couldn't help but smile. You go, J&W. Clear the cobwebs, paint the walls, and maybe, just maybe, keep an extra loaf of bread handy for whatever secrets are still waiting in the back garden.