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quote:RottenPoorHome came out of the closet to say: quote:Livestock came out of the closet to say: This looked exactly like my grandmother's (paternal) house. It was about at this stage when my grandfather had to be put in a home, and it only worsened as the next couple of years went by. To top it all off, my grandma was a cat lady. She had something like 6 cats at one point, as well as this old poodle. It was so old it was getting skin cancer (or something equally disgusting) and she would pick lesions off its skin. This would cause bleeding and scabs, which she would later pick off again. The only reason the dog didn't resist was because it was older than me (16, at the time) and was barely alive at all. Thankfully, my dad finally just took it to the vet one day while my mother, sister and I went shopping with her, and "mysteriously" the dog didn't return. As for the cats, she would sometimes go for days without feeding them, or feed them too much. Eventually, she took to feeding them on the dining room table. They crapped all over and it was a mess. We could no longer eat there when we visited, unless we did so outside. For a year or two, she had a live-in nurse (or whatever you'd call an assisted living person) and things improved. Then the day came when she finally had to be put in the home with my grandpa. We were now left with a house chock full of all sorts of crap and a half dozen cats that hated all human contact and hid or attacked us on demand. Our first priority was catching the cats so we could get to work cleaning out the house. One of the cats was grossly overweight, and literally had to drag itself from place to place. It had no fur on it's underside from all the friction. That one was easy to capture. As for the rest, they just ran away, but since my dad's a state park ranger, he had access to non-lethal traps and we loaded them up and put them in the house. When we'd captured the other five, we gave them all to the animal shelter, but God only knows what became of the drat things. All was well, and we began moving through the house, picking through as much as we could in hopes of finding valuable items. Aside from some very nice Hitchcock furniture, we did find some old first-edition books (she was a librarian) and an exquisite slate pool table in the basement, but much of what we found was just useless trinkets or outright trash. She also had a collection of dozens of dolls, both traditional dolls and paper ones, which were all labeled as being for my younger sister on such and such a date for various holidays and birthdays. Since she had forgotten about them, my sister hadn't gotten any of the dolls for years. One of her favorite activities was apparently collecting small plastic bags. These would be placed in larger and larger bags, running up through ziplock and grocery bags, all the way up to trash bags. Having reached the limits of plastic, this mass of plastic bags was then stuffed in paper sacks. These would alternately be placed in cardboard boxes or canvas bags. The best part was going through every single bag, because we couldn't be sure if she had stowed money in there for "safe-keeping" or some equally nutty scheme. We literally rented a dumpster when we were cleaning this place out, but what made it scarier was it was a tiny little house (1,000 sq. ft. AT MOST), sitting on a plot perhaps twice its size. How all that stuff fit in there, we will never know. Then came the topper. As we moved through the house, we entered my dad's childhood room upstairs. Something wasn't quite right, though. There was this odd stench permeating the air, even more malodorous than what could be encountered through the rest of the house. As I stepped around the bed, I was greeted by a horrendously-clawed mattress; much of the lower bed had been shredded to bits. The culprit was lying nearby, in the form of a dead cat. Apparently, there were seven. The poor thing had starved/dehydrated in that little room. While we had visited the house every single day, there had been no noise or any other sign that we should check the room before then. The cat had been so afraid of human contact that it had hid itself rather than be rescued, which would explain why we had never really seen it before, either. It was simultaneously funny because of the irony, and really sad because it was the final indicator of how weird my grandma had been.
Lord Hawking fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Dec 15, 2003 |
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Dec 15, 2003 11:08
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quote:rojay came out of the closet to say:
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Dec 15, 2003 18:48
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quote:StraightRazor came out of the closet to say:
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Dec 17, 2003 15:27
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quote:StraightRazor came out of the closet to say:
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Dec 17, 2003 21:32
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quote:Lioness came out of the closet to say: With those 6 it was the fact that it was a small house to begin with, the lack of open space due to the hoarding, and my general allergies to cats. I love 'em, but I can barely take the one my parents keep at home. It's funny because when I went to college, all my respiratory problems cleared up, but as soon as I go home WHAM! instant sneezing/runny nose/itchy eyes. Fortunately, all the ones I dealt with were spayed and neutered, and had at least started out housebroken. There's a special place for you in Kitty Heaven thanks to your efforts in that 25-feline cleanup.
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Dec 18, 2003 20:29
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