LOOKING BACK: Is it collecting or hoarding?

— When does collecting become hoarding?

Flea markets and antique shops flood the Ozarks.

I still have a few of those once essentials - a butter mold and paddles, oil lamps. I gave my butter churn (yes, I used to pump that wooden handle up and down) to my sister Gay, who also likes old things.

I like old things ... but only if they look new, like my ceramic pitcher and wash bowl filled with dried flowers, a copper bucket setting on my counter filled with kitchen utensils and a matching copper coffee pot. Antique irons serve as door stops.

Morgan once asked, "Grandma, why can’t we put the irons on the stove and get them hot and iron with them?" Old items make wonderful teaching tools.

My philosophy is, if you don’t use it, you don’t need it. I keep a box where I constantly toss garage-sale stuff, or make annual trips to the Salvation Army. My personal rule is that for every piece of clothing that goes into my closet, one outfit must be discarded.

Unlike my elegant "collecting," my husband "saves" everything. Our hall closet holds old pictures and letters, programs from his senior class play and Jr./Sr. banquet and their class memory book. I won’t mention Jerry’s clothes hanging in a spare closet.

Or everything around his recliner, from partiallyread magazines to shoes to remote controls.

Jerry’s accumulations sometimes come in handy.

Like when we wondered how much our personal tax had been raised. Pulling a few papers from a box, I found out more than I wanted to know - the amount of our 1960 Poll Tax, and the receipt for $1 we paid to vote. This dollar fee was done away with because it was declared a hardship for the poor. But we have proof we paid ours, in case we ever need it.

He also has a little black book. No mysterious addresses. Instead, its pages record the cost of every item purchased when we built our house over 40 years ago and the cost of each improvement since. It lists all the cows we owned and the day every calf was born. Jerry still has his selective service card from 1951.

Hardback stories of guns and wilderness and animals fill my living room bookshelf, relics of a book club Jerry once joined. Paperback westerns line a 50-year-old bookcase. He’s saved newspapers that may one day be valuable - with articles about Sam Walton’s death and the time four presidents met together.

Jerry’s accumulation (he doesn’t like the word "hoarding") includes an antique 1922 Rogers license plate with a picture of an apple, a paper fan picturing the town of Pea Ridge in 1920; records of expenses from his dad’s trip to Canada to buy a car-load of sheep in 1919; the silver loving cup and newspaper clipping from 1947 wherethe Gravette Boy Scout won first place for building the best birdhouse in a Northwest Arkansas District contest.

Two sheds hold Jerry’s outside stockpile, including every tool collected during our 59 years of marriage, a froe (a wedge to spit wooden shingles); a bunghole reamer (a tool used to make holes in wooden kegs through which liquid is poured in or drained out). As if he doesn’t have enough stuff, he attended his aunt’s farm sale a few years ago and bought more old things, including a copper wash tub. She’d lived in the same house for 70 years and had kept everything.

Could hoarding be an inherited trait?

Do I dare throw anything of Jerry’s away? The minute I toss a trinket or paper, that’s the one he asks for.

It’s true! Jerry laments the many things we did get rid of "that would now be antiques and worth lots of money."

Once I found a pair of pliers while taking my walk. I happily showed them to Jerry and he said, "They’re rusty." Am I missing something here? I thought he liked rusty. Oh, well, at least I don’t have to worry about him getting rid of me.

Marie Putman is a former Gravette resident and regular contributor to the Westside Eagle Observer.

News, Pages 7 on 03/07/2012