The “big questions” don’t come up in daily life very often. For Dave and me, learning about his defective heart in 2006 could have changed everything: After two heart attacks, and with limited blood flow to that critical organ, it looked like we had an answer to what would end…

One morning as I scrambled for my car keys, to go fetch Dave the day’s set of newspapers (New York Times, Burlington Free Press, local Caledonian-Record, maybe the Washington Post if it looked good), I laughed and said to the Boss, “It’s like you are Nero Wolfe and I’m your…

Gumdrops. The details are now a bit hazy, but I think that’s what I brought with me. Although it might have been M&Ms. The point was, small edible items that came in many colors. Alas, after the planning exercise, they’d all been fingered too much to bother eating them. Still…

The untimely death of Dave’s aunt DM, just a few years older than he was, came in part because she was without a partner or relative willing to notice and blow the whistle on her hoarding — and she died by accident in the heap of goods that literally filled…

We didn’t mean to do it. That is, Dave and I never sat down to ask “what would be our perfect life?” We just tumbled into it, kept hugging each other in delight, and never looked back … Neither of us had pure motives! Mine were twofold: At first, I…

A rainbow has two ends, and it’s hard to tell where each one lands — from a distance you think you know, but the closer you drive, the further away the rainbow seems to move, until you turn a corner as the sun shines even more brightly, and the band…

When I stumbled into 12-Step recovery, back in 1990, the clearest measure of the mess my life had become was the telephone account: One month after another, when payments fell behind, I patched gaps in service with payphone use and phone cards, and I scrambled to keep my checks from…

From our apartment in Vermont, I reached out to New Haven charitable organizations. The Salvation Army. A synagogue. A church group. There had to be groups who’d want to distribute all those things, still in their white bags, as purchased. In some way, I’d stepped into a parallel set of…

The first time I entered the home of a hoarder — which is not the same as a collector! — was around 1988 on a Vermont back road. The structure itself was probably historic, a modest white-painted farmhouse. Inside, towers of newspapers and plastic containers and cardboard boxes outlined paths…