The Dining Room

I don't really have a lot to say about the dining room. It was another one of those unnecessary rooms and really was just another place to pile stuff.  Mostly it was home to pictures. Mom took pictures of everything we did and we were involved in so many activities...dance, baseball, soccer, 4-H, scouts, etc. On top of that we tagged along with mom to meetings for PTA and Jaycees and a whole array of other organizations. In some ways it kept us busy and occupied outside the house, but on the flip side it gave us opportunity after opportunity to put on a good face and act like everything was okay. Either way, the dining room table - a wedding gift to my parents from my Grandpa - was buried under piles of photos and film canisters. A typewriter also sat on the back corner of the table, but for there was never a reason for us kids to go back in that corner of the room, so it somehow became scary to me. It wasn't until we went through the house in October 2013 that I realized it was the only corner of the house where you could see the carpet.

Photo @ Geoff Johnson

During that visit we also discovered a whole collection of tea cups that my dad's grandmother had passed down to my mom. They were stored in the china cabinet and with the exception of a little dust, they were in perfect condition. There were very few valuable or sentimental things that were salvageable from the house, but these are some of them and I'm so happy to have them and be able to pass them on to my kids one day.

Back when we lived there and the roof started leaking, the dining room had tubs and containers to try to catch the water and garbage bags to cover the things nearby. At one point the inner layer of the back sliding glass door shattered and a pile of glass remained along the door track until we cleaned the house last year. The dining room was also the place that I accidentally spilled my jar of mealworms that I had from an elementary class project. Because of the layers of surrounding mess, the spill was nearly impossible to clean up entirely and the crawly creatures seemed to thrive in the house. For years I would spot little mealworms here and there and every time I did I had such a sense of guilt. One innocent childhood mistake that should not have been a big deal but it haunted me for years.

Overall, with the exception of going in and out the back door, the only other memory I have in the dining room was shaving my legs for the first time with an electric razor. Random, I know, but I'm sure it had something to do with the state of the bathroom, which I'll post about next...

Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Bathroom here. 
Read about Geoff's Room here. 
Read about My Bedroom here. 

The Kitchen

The kitchen was one of the rooms that made our home seem most abnormal.  Take, for instance, the sink.  I have no memory of the kitchen sink ever working.  I'm not sure if it was a broken pipe or a clogged drain.  I just don't ever remember being able to use the kitchen sink.

Photo © Geoff Johnson

And then there was the refrigerator.  It broke early and couldn't be fixed because how could anyone come into the mess to fix appliances?  I remember on occasion my mom would let my grandpa come over to fix something, but in later years she even kept him out.  We did get a small refrigerator for a time, but it too eventually broke and we resorted to keeping things on the back porch during the winter and in a cooler during the summer.  All that made life more difficult when mom's car would break down because it meant we would have to make daily walks to the grocery store to get ice for the cooler or just enough food for dinner and breakfast so it wouldn't go bad.  I hated walking to and from the grocery store so often.  And I also hated pouring icy milk in my cereal for breakfast in the winter when it was already so cold inside the house.  

The stove didn't really work either.  The stove top may have worked, but we never used it.  The oven, however, just barely functioned.  It heated up to a low temperature and while it wasn't really useful to cook anything in, we did turn it on and would stand by it in the winter to keep warm.  

Photo © Geoff Johnson

Winter in the house was almost unbearable.  Maybe that is why I hate the cold weather.  And now that I live in Florida it is almost hard to remember how cold it really was.  But those of you who battle negative degrees in the winter can imagine how miserable it was to come in from outside to a house that was just about the same temperature on the inside.   Not to mention the misery of taking a bath.  Granted the walls blocked the wind and snow, but it was still bitterly cold.  On occasion the furnace did work, but the vents were covered with newspaper and mom was too afraid of it starting a fire so she rarely ran it.  We did have a few small space heaters, but those too were a fire hazard so they were turned off at night.  

So what did work?  The phone.  It hung on the wall, and although it wasn't there when we returned to take pictures, I remember calling friends or answering Dad's calls when he was on his way to pick us up.  I also remember making numerous phone calls to mom when she was at work and Geoff and I were fighting.   

Likewise, the microwave worked and that allowed us to eat more than our fair share of microwave dinners.  Eating fast food and microwave dinners day-in and day-out caused me to develop an unhealthy relationship with food.  If you give a child the opportunity to pick between chicken nuggets or a hamburger and french fries or Taco Bell for dinner every night, they never gain the knowledge on what healthy food choices look like.  I was overweight by the time I was a teenager and when I finally moved out and had the opportunity to take control, I found myself on the verge of a dangerous eating disorder. I later learned how much eating disorders grow out of a need for control, and with such a chaotic childhood, this became one area I could actually control.  Within about a year of moving out I had lost 50 pounds.  

Thankfully, God has redeemed so much of that!  And although I still struggle with control in other areas of my life, I now have a heightened awareness of it.  It is a learning process but the Lord has been gracious to teach me so much about resting in His sovereignty and fighting not for control, but for those things that are good and right and true.

God has done so much more than that as well!  It may not have been until I moved in with my dad that I really had a chance to experiment in the kitchen and although it wouldn't be until I got married that I built any habit of sitting down at the table for a meal, those are two things I value so much now...cooking at home and eating dinner with my husband and kids around the table each night.  Not to mention having people over to my house for dinner! Maybe one day we will even live near family and get to host a holiday meal!

Read about Opening the Door here. 
Read about The Living Room here.  
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.  
Read about Geoff's Room here. 
Read about My Bedroom here. 

The Living Room

As I type this, I'm sitting in my kitchen, looking out over the table to the living room. The living room is where we all pile on the couch to read books, bedtime stories and Bible stories. It is where we video chat with family members spread out all over the US. It is where Friday night movies happen with popcorn and M&M's and where laundry gets piled on the couch until I can eventually fold it. It is where we have dance parties, perform songs, play board games, build forts and create other imaginary places. It is where the kids lounge on their bean bags, stack their bean bags, jump from the couch to their bean bags, hide under their bean bags. (We love our bean bags around here!)  It is where we pray for our extended family and friends and the missionaries we support. It is where we open Christmas presents, do Jesse Tree and 12 Days of Christmas devotions, Resurrection Eggs, and Easter Baskets. It is where pictures of my nephews and niece are displayed as well as a painting Brandon gave me when we were dating. It is where picture albums from years ago line our shelves and wedding gifts adorn our wall. It is where friends have gathered for Bible Studies and birthday parties and just to catch up.

As a child however, my memories of the living room are much different. It is strange how much living we didn't, or couldn't do in the living room. It wasn't a necessary room and therefore was one that never even really had a path through it to any piece of furniture.

There are a few memories of random things that must have meant it was clean and function-able at some point. I remember one Christmas walking out to find gifts from Santa - a toy ironing board, among other things, on the floor under the tree. I also remember that the JC Penney and Sears catalogs were kept under the couch and I remember it scared me to reach under there as a child. But those two memories mean mostly one thing to me...at one point the floor was visible. I have very few memories of the floor in that house. Those memories are limited to certain places - but never do I remember looking at a room and seeing the whole floor or even the carpet. The carpet was a yellow color but the 'carpet' I remember was newspaper. Layers and layers of newspaper. Several inches deep. The newspaper carpet made the whole house seem smaller because as you walked down the hallway or into a room, you stood at least 6 inches off the floor and therefore the ceiling seemed to close in on you. I'm sure it wasn't just the newspaper. I'm sure it was, in part, the boxes of old records, piles of bills and bags of pamphlets that lined the walls. But all that faded into the background and those boxes and piles almost became permanent fixtures in the house, as if they were a table that stood there instead of heaps of trash.

Photo © Geoff Johnson

I know there was a season when mom slept on the couch. And I have memories of coming home from school to watch TV - but even by then there was only a small section of the couch I could sit on and the TV was on the edge of a random table surrounded by junk.

The living room is actually one place I remember trying to clean. But that process was always so frustrating. Geoff and I had to stand and wait for mom to hand us something. She would tell us if we could throw it away or if we needed to put it in a new pile. Most things just went into new piles and we never felt like anything got accomplished. Those new piles soon were made on the couch and when it was eventually overtaken, mom started sleeping in Geoff's room. Eventually, the TV was also moved to Geoff's room and then one year we stopped getting Christmas trees because there was nowhere to display them. From that point forward, I'm not sure we ever went into the living room, except maybe to open a window on a hot summer day. One day, that same window got stuck and wouldn't close all the way.   And despite our best efforts of putting a piece of wood in front of it, it did little to block the cold air from coming in during the winter months. Over time, the living room became wet and moldy because of the leaky roof. It wasn't until years after I moved out that the roof was fixed; however, the falling ceiling on the inside remained and the mold continued to grow.

I don't think I really missed the living room as a child, but now as an adult...as a mother...I realize how much life it could have held. In some ways I'm not sure that it was possible for me to understand and grieve all the loss from a childhood like this until I became a mother.  Now I watch my children run and play freely in our home and find it hard to imagine their lives any different. I don't have memories like that as a child, instead we were trapped between the piles with nowhere to play.

Photo © Geoff Johnson

I suppose the lack of space inside is one reason we played outside and at friends' houses so often, giving us some glimpses of normality as a child. Despite the fact that no one could come in our house, our yard was one of the best in the neighborhood! It had great climbing trees and a tether ball and a wooded area to build forts and hideouts. It was also large enough to play a decent game of baseball or football and mom let me dig out a few areas of grass to grow a garden. It was a place of many happy memories and that is probably why I often wish we had more of an established yard now for my kids to explore. Either way, I trust their childhood memories will be very different from mine!  Memories filled with friends at our house and memories with space to run and play and dance and build and LIVE!

Read about Opening the Door here.  
Read about The Kitchen here.  
Read about The Dining Room here. 
Read about The Bathroom here. 
Read about Geoff's Room here. 
Read about My Bedroom here. 

Opening the Door

Every time I start to write these posts, I hesitate. I feel like putting my childhood on display for the world to read about somehow only gives me one chance to say everything. And there is just so much to say. Where should I even start? This is not my first time writing about my childhood home. Many of my faithful readers have heard stories on my personal blog over the past year that have led me to this place. Others close to me, have seen pictures. And even fewer have walked through the door and into the mess with me at one point or another in the past. I could count those people on one hand. Many of you have asked about details. More of you have probably wondered. And as I have journeyed through it all to where I am today, I think sharing it here now seems appropriate.

A few months after my mom passed away, my brother, Geoff and I spent a weekend in the house together. He had been wanting to take pictures of the house and so we took a few days to capture images of it before we cleaned it out. It was a hard but wonderfully healing weekend. Geoff and I had not been back in the house together since I moved out in 1993, twenty years before. The few times I had returned, it was never for more than about 30 minutes. The months that led up to that weekend visit were filled with sleepless nights. I tossed and turned as I thought about so many aspects of our childhood years in that home. And the times I did sleep were littered with dreams having to do with the house. Somehow, the Lord used that weekend with my brother to break the hold the house had on me. Geoff and I talked about life back then, sharing memories and recalling stories that only the two of us would know. As we took measurements, metered light, angled the cameras and snapped pictures we captured glimpses of our life that no one else knew about. A few months later as we talked about the project and about Geoff submitting the photos for review and publication, it seemed appropriate that the title for the work would be "Behind the Door." Today, two of those pictures are published in American Photography 30 for all the world to see and the entire series has been highlighted on Feature Shoot as well as on DailyMail.com, Yahoo, and ABC Online news, among others.  

However, for most of my life these things have remained hidden. Not only behind closed doors but deep in my heart with shame and grief and confusion.  And while I came to a place years ago where I was willing to journey into that mess, I knew I couldn't do it publicly out of respect for my mom. Please don't think that my respect for her has faded since her death, I'm simply convinced that the state of her soul is no longer concerned about such things. Is airing her 'dirty laundry' tainting her memory? Is it dishonoring her? This is one of the questions I have wrestled with for the past 23 months. And while these posts are more of my story than they are about my mother's, it certainly points to her in many ways. My mom lived under the heavy weight of hoarding for more years than I know. She loved and was loved by so many people but they could never come to her house. She battled cancer for 10 years without feeling free to have people come over to visit or bring her dinner or help her with daily tasks. And now that she has passed from this life into eternity, she no longer is in bondage to such things. While no one wants their dark secrets on display for the world to see, when such things are seen in light of eternity and can now be hung up and declared forgiven and healed because of Christ, that dear friends, is praiseworthy! Darkness brought to light is worth shouting from the rooftops! Christ forgives! He heals! He redeems! He frees! And because of those great truths, I have no doubt that my mom would want Geoff and me to experience as much healing as possible this side of heaven; she would want us to open the door and start the conversation with any that might be in hiding in similar places.

But like I said, this isn't so much about my mom. These are memories from a child of a hoarder. So while I have a tinge of anxiety in my heart as I post, I trust that God will use the opening of these doors to friends and family to move my heart further into His grace and healing.

Without further ado, let's start at the front door. It is strange how familiar it all still is...the dirty cream-colored paint, the rattle of the door handle, the way you have to shake the key so it would turn. The front door carries so much meaning. It was what stood between us and the world...friends, family, neighbors, repairmen. Back then if there was a knock at that door, a part of my heart would stop. Who was it? What did they want? Can I get them to wait in the car or meet me in the backyard?

The door kept the hoarding hidden in the secret world that my mom, my brother and I lived in every day. Geoff went back to the house in August 2013 for the first time in probably 15 years. That initial flood of emotion that comes when you walk back into a place that holds difficult memories was interrupted within minutes of Geoff's arrival.  There was a knock at the door. He instantly backed up against the door. It was instinct. It is what we would do if someone knocked or rang the doorbell all those years ago. We would hide, duck out of the way of any window in hopes that no one would know we were there. If they thought we weren't home, they would leave. At the very least if we didn't answer the door right away they would turn and walk away and we could eventually open the door without them being able to see inside. It is strange how those memories are still deeply embedded in us.

I responded similarly when I took two dear friends into the house with me last May. It was immediately after my mom's funeral and my youngest son, still 6 months old, was with me. He was asleep and taking him into the house with us was not an option. There was mold and other unknowns to which I wasn't willing to expose him. With the front door left open, I left him asleep on the porch in his car seat, knowing we would only be inside a few minutes and that I would only be down the hallway. My dear friends walked through the mess with me and as we stood at the top of the staircase they prayed with me...for me...for healing, for freedom. In the meantime, a neighbor had seen us pull into the driveway and before I realized it, she was at our steps. The door was wide open and the mess was there for her to see. I stood maybe ten feet from her, but everything in me was shrinking inside knowing all that those ten feet exposed.

I can't remember the door ever being so widely opened that I could see or talk to someone on the porch while I stood at the top of the landing inside. Feelings of embarrassment and shame flooded my mind. Everything in me wanted to shut the door, but my baby was there and I couldn't. And, besides, it was no longer necessary. Even as we had just prayed, light was beginning to come into the darkness. And now looking back, it seems appropriate that those first steps of healing came between us and the neighbors from whom we so diligently tried to hide it all from for so long. God was beginning to bring life back to those places in my heart that had been hidden for years.

The desolate land shall be tilled, 

that which had laid desolate

in the sight of all who passed by.

Ezekiel 36:34

I still have issues with 'doorbell dread'. When there is a knock at my door today my immediate thought is how the house looks. Are there dishes in the sink? Laundry on the couch? Papers on the counter? Toys all over the floor? This is one of the many fears that I still have to fight regularly to overcome. And yet, I love having people in my house. Perhaps because there are years to make up for or perhaps because I long to give those memories to my kids that I never had the chance to make as a child.

But what about when we had to open the door? Those times were obviously unavoidable so even as kids, we knew we needed to minimize the view into the house. Geoff and I were very aware of the real possibility that if others saw the mess, we could be taken away from mom. So we learned to crack the door just enough to see outside, but not enough for those outside to see the full picture of what was behind the door. It was a heavy burden for children to carry, living in fear of being taken away, not even really knowing what that meant. So as a child you minimize the view of reality. And then you grow up and maybe your house is neat and orderly, but you minimize the view of the reality of your heart. You hide. You pretend. You look good on the outside, but in reality, your heart is a mess and this is what lies behind the door:

Photo © Geoff Johnson

The staircase was so full of stuff that as I grew, I literally would hold onto the railings and jump down the stairs instead of trying to navigate through the papers, books and bags.

The ledge on the right was where everything collected. Incoming and outgoing mail. Receipts, pamphlets, coins, cassette tapes, film canisters and everything in between. Last October, it is where Brandon found my mom's emerald rings and other valuable jewelry, tucked in with the expired jar of jelly and buttons from Jaycee conventions long past.

The coat rack behind the door has held the same clothes and hangers for as long as my memory serves me. They were never used, at least not that I can remember. They just became permanent fixtures like many of the things in the house.

Behind the door there was a pile of newspapers and magazines, overflowing to the point that we really couldn't open the door completely, even if we tried. That pile extended down the other staircase to the basement. Those stairs were even more full of junk than the one pictured above. And I hated to go down them. Some stairs had barely enough room to put your foot down firmly, others you had to step over completely. I slipped on the papers that lined those stairs more times than I care to remember.

But somewhere tucked deep in my mind is one faint memory that must have been before the clutter took over. In that memory, I'm sitting at the bottom of those stairs with my dad next to me. It is foggy and with little detail, but still it remains my only memory of my dad being in the house. So although I have no recollection of when it was or what we might have been doing or talking about, it carries with it a sense of tenderness that I treasure.

Those stairs led to the basement. It was a dark, unfinished (or half finished) room that smelled of mildew and where a myriad of other worthless things had been collecting. In the middle of it all was a ping pong table. It, too, was covered in junk, but you couldn't reach any of its four sides without scaling over piles of trash. At one point, before I was old enough to remember, a fireplace was being installed in the corner. It was never finished however, and a hole remained in the wall that goes through to the outside. I imagine that is why critters could get inside. That is probably why I hated the basement so much. Mice were not uncommon in the winter and my brother was even confronted by a squirrel as he came in from the snow one day. Bugs and spiders of all kinds lived probably more freely in the house than we did. And the basement was certainly in worse form than the rest of the house.

From the steps there was a narrow 'path' that lead about four feet from the stairs to the the laundry room door. The laundry room had the most open floor space in the whole house. That was likely because the sewer backed up frequently. And as filthy as it was, somehow the laundry room seemed the most normal. Maybe because it isn't uncommon for people's basement laundry rooms to be unfinished and in somewhat of a mess, filled with household chemicals and other utilitarian things. It also was the one place where my mom would let people come. If the sewer did back up, the repairman could come in through the garage without seeing the rest of the house.

The laundry room also was a means to an end. It was the place we could wash our clothes (when the washing machine was working) and iron our clothes so that we could look presentable to the rest of the world in hopes they wouldn't know the truth. To this day, ironing remains one of my favorite household chores. Perhaps it was the only routine thing I had to do around the house growing up and somehow looking put together on the outside always made me feel like I was more together on the inside, no matter what was behind the door.

Read about The Living Room here.  
Read about The Kitchen here. 
Read about The Dining Room here. 
Read about The Bathroom here. 
Read about Geoff's Room here. 
Read about My Bedroom here. 

The House: The Final Chapter

Taken from original post in September 2014. 

Well, after sixteen months and six trips to Nebraska, we are finally wrapping up Mom's estate.  We have a few final loose ends to tie up but a few weeks ago a big part of it was brought to a close.  We SOLD the house!

It really was amazing to see God's hand in the whole thing.  Since the early days after Mom passed away, Geoff and I have had numerous conversations about what to do with the house.  Both of us loved the idea of seeing it redeemed, restored and brought back to a place where a family could live in it again.  But as the months passed we had a chance to better evaluate the house in it's current condition.  We also had a reality check on how much time and money it was already taking from our personal families and it was hard to know how much it would require if we were going to bring it back to life.  In addition, it put some stress on Geoff and my relationship at times and so, after having a few people go through it for remodeling estimates, we decided it would be better to sell 'as is'.

During my trip in June, when we were having our first of the two garage sales, my mom's dear friend, came and sat with me most of one day.  Her son stopped by and she casually asked him if he knew anyone who flips houses.  Well, the very next day a couple showed up at the garage sale.  My mom's friend's son had talked to a friend and that friend's parents talked to this couple.  They heard we were interested in selling the house and asked if they could check it out.  Well, long story short they made an offer that day!

Geoff and I were a little taken back and had some work to do on our side to make sure we wanted to move forward.  And because they wanted to pay cash, they had some things to do on their side as well.  For a few months we didn't know if it would actually go through.  Due to the fact that it was a completely private sale, we didn't have a contract on the house and Geoff and I grew a little anxious about waiting, but on September 12th everything went through and Geoff closed on it in Omaha.  Meanwhile, in Florida, this was waiting for me in the backyard.

I am still amazed and humbled!  As we anticipated a closing date, I asked the Lord for a rainbow.  I knew I didn't necessarily need one, but it had just been a beautiful part of the story and I hoped that same beauty of God's faithful presence would be what brought this journey to an end.  Brandon, the kids and I prayed and we were all thrilled to discover this FULL rainbow waiting that morning!  (I love that along the way, each rainbow we have seen in regards to the house, hasn't been a little corner of the rainbow in the clouds but all five have been FULL rainbows!  How often does that happen?)  There is no explanation other than we serve a powerful and good God!  And as the kids ran outside to see it...Isabelle said "It is because we prayed for a rainbow!"  And Collins said "It is because God LOVES us!"  And then as he walked back inside he said, "It is because He is so powerful!"  Amen, Collins!  I love that they were able to see this very tangible answer to our prayers.  And so we took a detour from our lesson plans and added a page to our book about God.  What a wonderful testimony of God's faithfulness to us!

I will say that part of me hoped that all the emotional side of the house would be sorted through and figured out by the time we closed on it, but I'm realizing that as with most wounds, our hearts won't be fully healed this side of Heaven.  And that leaves me longing for more than rainbows, it makes me anxious for the fullness of His glory when He returns!