8-minute read time.
A goat path can be many things.
It can be a grassy meadow, terraformed to be later used as a roadway or a trail. It is sometimes called a desire path or a desire line, an unplanned trail created by natural erosion caused by human or animal traffic. The more the path is used, the more noticeable it becomes. I faintly remember that, across my undergraduate college campus, several goat paths can be found, especially in areas where the paved walking path makes the distance or journey more complicated and longer.
In hoarder circles, a goat path or goat trail is a unique term for the clear pathways used to navigate the clutter in a hoarder’s home. It might wind through the mountains of items in the same pattern the individual typically takes, the hoard threatening to topple over with every step.
The goat paths in my mother’s home are etched in my memory.
When I lived there, the floor was covered as soon as you entered the house. My mother’s goat paths can be defined as areas of space with items smushed down just enough that you were forced to walk on them rather than on patches of bare ground, at least in the large living spaces. As you entered the front door, the only accessible entrance to the abode, you were promptly met by the junk on the floor. The door itself could barely be opened, but when you did manage to push it open, you had to climb into the living room using the meager goat path created by my mother, my brother, and myself. Once in the living room, you could turn left or right.
If you took the goat path to the left, you would take a few steps and be met with the stairs that led to the second floor. If the house was in a liveable, normal condition, taking a left in the living room would give you a couple of options: going upstairs or into the kitchen and basement hallway. With my mother’s condition, access to the kitchen and basement hallway from the living room was completely blocked off, and since we were able to get to those areas through the kitchen itself, it was not worth trampling over the mountains of junk.
The goat paths, as you went up the stairs, were more barren. The stairs were almost always clear, besides a few stacks of items, like books or movies, pushed to the side of them. I figure that my mother’s hoarding left that area alone because she feared one of us would fall down the stairs one day. The upstairs hallway was relatively clean of junk on the floor as well, although I always remember there would be some sort of object shoved against the wall. In the pictures I took in 2022, you can see cans of cat food, piles of books, and boxes of random items stacked almost neatly against the side of the space, leaving just enough room for us to pass by.
You could walk into one of our rooms off the hallway. My room, almost always kept clean, my personal oasis in a desert of destruction, had no need for a goat path. My brother, who is easily entrapped by the laziness and messiness of hoarding, typically had a disorderly room but left a wide goat path through the middle to get to his bed. My mother’s room, which was barely touched unless to sleep in, had a single small path leading to the side of the bed she slept on. That room was the worst of the three bedrooms.
The last two rooms upstairs also had their own versions of goat paths. The office, which contained two large bookcases stuffed with old children’s books neither my brother nor I read anymore, alongside the litter boxes that were kept in a strangely pristine condition, mostly had pet supplies traipsed across the floor, not high enough to be a bother when walking, but making the room look chaotic. The bathroom, which only ever had trash and clothes on the floor, was kept clean enough that you could pretty much step around the entire small bathroom, as long as you didn’t slip on a pair of pants or a lone sock.
If you had initially decided to enter the house and take a right from the living room, you had one path available. This goat path had a few offshoots, but because of the downstairs’s open layout, you could only take the one main route. This goat path circled from the living room, past racks of CDs and piles of random finds from Facebook Marketplace, into the dining room, where the unusable table sat with its towering stacks of possessions – old pictures of unknown characters, new thrifting finds, plates of moldy food precariously balanced ontop of storage boxes. It ended in the kitchen, with its cupboards shoved full of old food inhabited by maggots and moths, and a refrigerator with melting vegetables, so old and rotten that they had turned to liquid mush.
The offshoots of this main winding path led to the couch in the living room, the downstairs bathroom, and the basement. The sofa, one of the few areas where our family convened together, eventually filled with items once I moved out. The downstairs bathroom, the floor heaped with clothes, was only functional for using the toilet, the washer, and the dryer; the toilet often filled with rotten milk or yogurt, things my mother thought could be flushed instead of thrown away. The bathtub and the sink were too full of dirty pots and pans to use. The goat path leading to the basement was cut short on the basement stairs once you met the black garbage bags filled with previous years of junk, remnants from when I tried to clean the house years before, when I only had the option to push the hoarding out of sight rather than out of the house.
The goat paths that helped my family travel through the hoarding of my mother’s home slowly became less and less pronounced as my mother’s mental health declined… after numerous breakups, family fights, and once I moved out of the house and to college. I was not there to support her or keep the paths open. At one point, around two years ago, shortly after my attempts to help my mother clean up in a way that respected her control failed, I decided to stop entering the house.
The next and final time I entered the house was after we were given clearance to retrieve our prized possessions once the firefighters had cleared the scene. When I stepped inside that day, the air was thick with the stench of smoke and sorrow, and the once-cluttered maze had burned into a network of thin goat paths etched through the soot. We moved through them like ghosts, following the narrow trails from one memory to the next, picking through ash and ruin to find what pieces of our past were still salvageable. I took the path to the staircase and rescued a small Tiffany lamp I had always admired. It had never been turned on—not once—not even fitted with a bulb. But I had loved its quiet presence amidst the hoard, the way it held beauty without need for function. I cupped it in my hands like something sacred.
Then, I followed the goat path upstairs, past shattered windows that let in a gray light, past walls blackened and flaking like old bark. At one point, I lost my footing, almost falling to the ground. To gain my balance, my hand fell upon one of the walls, and it squished under my hand, full of gallons of water used to douse the blaze. I eventually reached what used to be my room, long overtaken by my mother’s hoarding once I moved out, a burial ground for forgotten things. I had to forge a path, stepping over warped boxes, melted plastic, fragments of my old life imploded. I reached the closet and found my high school diploma resting there, thin and warm from the fire, smelling faintly of charred vinyl and smoke. I lifted it carefully, like it was an artifact dug from wreckage. I took nothing else besides the lamp and my diploma.
Since that day, I have carried a quiet vow with me: that I will never again be forced to take a goat path in my own home. I will walk in straight and curvy lines, anywhere I want. I will breathe air that smells of cedar and warmth, not ruin. I will live in a house where paths are not carved through chaos but open like arms—where light is not just ornamental but turned on. I won’t be like my mother’s disorder. I love my mom, but not her hoarding disorder.
