10-minute read time.
Today’s post is one of the articles I wrote for my Master’s program. This was my professor’s comment about it:
“I know that we talked about this, and I encouraged you to go for it, but I think that it really does not work as a climate narrative. Good on taking a risk, and good on the clarity and organization of your writing, but the hoarding based on a person’s mental condition and the natural hoarding of food by an animal just don’t equate for me, or suggest a connection. You give most of the length to your mother and the fire, which is interesting in itself (and could well work in another science narrative relative to a hoarding disorder), but then the shift to an owl is abrupt and of a very different kind–a survival technique that makes good sense in the animal world. I don’t at all see your mother as an owl. What most interests me (and I imagine readers generally) is the effect of warming (and perhaps other climate changes) on various animals and the accessibility of their foods. When food sources meant to stay frozen rot, that’s serious for animal survival. I can think of other examples, too–flooding that destroys fields, layers of ice that makes it impossible for caribou to reach the lichen they need, or deep snow that buries stashed foods where animals can’t get to them. Writing about such an unexplored result of climate change would be really interesting, with a fresh perspective. Are you willing to pivot to a topic like that for your revision, or to tackle something else? I know that you initially had some other ideas. We can talk by email or phone/zoom if you like.”
Okay, I do understand where my professor is coming from. Maybe it’s hard to build the connection between the pygmy owl and my mom. But I liked it, and I thought it was worth posting. Does anyone else either like or dislike this piece?
I was the first person to pick up the phone that Sunday morning. I ignored the first ring from the unknown number, thinking the call was a scam. The second ring that followed immediately after, I picked up. A strangely calm yet urgent voice answered, asking if I was Erica’s daughter, sharing that my mother was not picking up her phone, and telling me that there was an ongoing situation at my house.
“Situation?” I asked.
“Your house is on fire.”
Immediate tears. Immediate heart-wrenching, gut-tearing, grief-filled tears. They streamed down my face, creating a river of salt and mascara. After I received the news, still crying and hyperventilating, I called my mother over and over. She didn’t answer. I called my mother’s girlfriend, who is always by her side. She picked up after the second call. I heard my mom’s voice through my phone’s speaker, almost irritated that I was calling so much, explaining that her phone was dead.
“Mom, our house is on fire!” I managed to blurt out, the hot tears continuing to rush down my face as my voice shook.
While the panic ensued, and I rushed to drive to Worcester from my college in Wellesley, the forever home I inhabited between the ages of 13 and 19 quietly fell into the loving embrace of a house fire that morning, November 26, 2023. It was my mother’s pride, the first house she bought since my parents divorced when I was 11.
The flames licked up its sides, top, and interior, moving with frenzied speed. The smoke, hungry, greedy, and lustful, clung to the walls of my home. The fire, its speed fueled by years of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and anxiety, quickly spread, leaving a path of destruction. Akin to savanna fires clearing grassland, the fire cleared the jungle encroaching into my home.
The jungle of forgotten hobbies, collected rubbish, clothing littering the floor, lost objects hidden under a fresh layer of junk. Whatever wasn’t destroyed by the smoke or the flames was destroyed by the firefighters who fought their way into the house, breaking the windows and doors and pushing past the mountains of junk. They sprayed the walls with gallons of water, saturating the house until the fire was extinguished. Everything was destroyed. The fire burned through my mother’s hoarding with no second thoughts.
My mother loved that house, but she didn’t take care of it. Her diagnosed hoarding disorder meant that things piled up, including clothes, CDs, books, paper, food, and so much more. She couldn’t part with her possessions. She always thought there was a need to save them, if not for herself, for someone else. She is a giver and constantly imagines what her loved ones will need, even if it means collecting more items in her space. Whenever I would push her to get rid of something, it was almost like she was electrocuted. Her eyes would widen, her hair would seemingly stand up on its own, and her hands would go up to her head, cupping her face in an attempt to block out my nagging.
She would accumulate, too. Free items on social media sites, discounts and clearance sales at the supermarket, and thrift and yard sales all contributed to the hoard. The items congested all the rooms in the house, piling up by the foot and covering every bare space on the floor. There was barely a path to walk through in the living room without tripping over a piece of junk.
The kitchen, where the fire started, had been the worst, filled with rotten and maggot-covered food. The smell was heavy and sickening, a mix of moldy vegetables and rot. It was an ungodly scent, but the sight was worse. Seeing bugs crawl around old packages of food is something no one should ever have to experience. Because of this, we never went into the kitchen, and frankly, I barely left my room at all. My mother relied on takeout and went to the grocery store almost every day to get fresh food for the next.
Because of the hoarding, my mother’s home had mice in the basement and walls. And in one of the walls that separated the kitchen and porch, the inside and the outside, a little hungry mouse had nibbled on a wire for the porch flood light. A spark went through that wire that morning, lighting the porch and kitchen ablaze. The rotten food, the bugs that called that kitchen home, and my nightmare of years burned in a matter of minutes. From there, the rest of the house followed.
The year that my mother’s house burned down, around the same time, a chill was approaching in western North America. After all, it was November. But this year, following the same gradual warming pattern as years before, was different.
The half-foot speckled pygmy owl, with her gleaming yellow eyes and round head, noticed the weather. For as long as this little bird could remember, autumn’s bite had signaled her to begin her careful ritual- her own form of hoarding- the one thing that would keep her alive through winter. She would stock her larder, her hidden cove tucked away in an old pine tree, with specifically chosen prey: voles, sparrows, and occasionally, a stray shrew. To her, the stash of food, the items she hoarded, were set aside for more than a good meal. Her hoard was a lifeline, a safety net, a glimmer of hope. It meant that when the snow buried the forest, she would not starve.
But this year, the season’s first frosts came and went, melting swiftly into warm spells, an effect of rising temperatures due to climate change. The once-icy mornings she counted on to keep her frozen hoard frozen turned into damp, unpredictable days, each warmer than the last. Instead of staying cool, the forest itself seemed to sweat, its air heavy with mist and the warmth of lingering autumn.
One day, as the owl went to check on her hoard, she recoiled in disgust. The smell seeping from the hole was so foul, so foreign, a rot so deep that it seemed to infest the wood itself. Voles that she had captured, killed, and stored just days before were coated with mold, their tiny bodies soft and discolored. The promise of the natural freezer was shattered due to the warming of the forest and the taloned claws of climate change.
In the following weeks, the little owl scrambled to replace the spoiled food, tirelessly pouring herself into her survival. But her energy faded, and each night, the forest grew quieter. Tiny creatures she once relied on for food hid under the fresh layers of snow that now blanketed the floor, their trails concealed, their movements silenced. Even with her talented hunting skills, the owl found it hard to catch anything. The hunger pangs forced her to pick over the rotten prey in her hoard, reluctantly eating what remained despite the smell.
Through each freeze-thaw cycle that winter, the owl’s brown feathers lost their luster, her flights grew shorter, and her surroundings became desolate. The other pygmy owls who inhabited the forest were silenced by the winter that had turned unforgivingly warm.
When spring finally sprung, when the vicious winter was over, the bird was a shadow of her former self. She was alive but forever changed, forever scarred by the warming events. She would survive for now and could only hope that when winter returned, the forest would bring her the cold she knew she could not live without.
In some ways, the owl’s struggle mirrors my mother’s. Global warming is in full effect due to years of burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and harmful industrial and agricultural processes that have caused climate change. For the owl, this gradual change disrupts her hoarding, just as the fire disrupted my mother’s. Both were bound by their instincts to hoard to secure what would help them survive. In the owl’s mind, the hoarding was necessary to make it through the winter. In my mother’s mind, the hoarding is necessary to make it through the torment in her brain caused by painful memories, buried trauma, and a cocktail of mental health disorders.
The owl hoarded food, each morsel a lifeline in the cold of winter; my mother, memories and mementos, alongside the occasional bits of trash, each item a connection to the past and a constant reminder of the everpresent shame that comes with hoarding. Yet, both saw their efforts unravel like a dropped ball of yarn, disrupted by forces beyond their control. The fire wiped out my mother’s refuge, while climate change threatened the owl’s.
As flames had turned my mother’s treasures to ash, the extreme warmth seeped through the forest, rotting the owl’s hard-won stash. Both were left with an omnipresent emptiness, reminders that the things we hold so close can sometimes be gone in an instant. I know that emptiness well; it’s a shadow that lingers over me as the daughter of my mother, the pygmy owl.
References/Sources
- Mathews CA. Hoarding disorder: more than just a problem of too much stuff. J Clin Psychiatry. 2014 Aug;75(8):893-4. doi: 10.4088/JCP.14ac09325. PMID: 25191909; PMCID: PMC4432907.
- Michael F. Clarke, Donald L. Kramer, Scatter-hoarding by a larder-hoarding rodent: intraspecific variation in the hoarding behavior of the eastern chipmunk, Tamias striatus, Animal Behaviour, Volume 48, Issue 2, 1994, Pages 299-308, ISSN 0003-3472, https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1994.1243.
- Masoero G, Laaksonen T, Morosinotto C, Korpimäki E. Climate change and perishable food hoards of an avian predator: Is the freezer still working? Glob Change Biol. 2020;26:5414–5430. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15250
