The messiest house in town

That would be our house. You really needed to see it to believe it. Mother always said it was Daddy's fault. Well eventually Daddy died and it was evident that it wasn't Daddy's fault.

We had stuff everywhere for as long as I can remember. It wasn't as bad when we were in El Paso, but there was still stuff. I remember a day when Mother entered my room and told me it was a pig sty. "What?" I thought. "How is my room different from everywhere else?" A that point I made a decision to be different - to be neat. I picked up every little thing angrily thinking that I would show her that should would never have to tell me to pick up anything again and she didn't.

In Houston, things were always messy. Ann made the comment recently that when company came, literally everything got shifted to Mother and Daddy's room. That was housekeeping. When they moved to Arkansas, things were so bad that you had to move stacks of things to have a place to sit or to eat at the table. When Daddy died, the floor was caked in dog hair.

Sometime near the end of last year, I asked a friend with experience in this field what that kind of housekeeping meant and she suggested undiagnosed depression. This could well be. Mother's been desperately unhappy for as long as I can remember. Daddy was a terrible disappointment. Most of her friends didn't live up to her expectations. Goodness knows Ann and I haven't, so it's entirely possible. Undiagnosed depression could explain some things.