I told him that he’d better be careful, that I might just have to see about his untimely demise. And I’m not sure I was kidding…
My husband is a border-line hoarder in the best of times. Now add in a health pandemic that has trapped us all indoors for 10 months and he is stockpiling items that I didn’t even know we used or needed. Take the pickles for example — he adds a pickle or two to his weekday chicken sandwich lunches. That’s maybe two pickles five times a week, less if we have a holiday weekend. Are there 12 sandwich sliced pickles in each jar? Is it more? I have never counted them, but let’s say that each jar lasts him almost two weeks. So he should really be buying two jars of pickles a month, right? Or eating less pickles…
I had to create a second pantry in our other spare room, the one that I am not using for my home office, to accommodate all these new dry goods that he keeps purchasing (it actually started in my home office, but I moved it in July because it was getting out of control and I didn’t want to stare at it all day. Oh and someone asked me during a Zoom meeting what all that stuff was behind me. Cause my husband is a hoarder…).
It’s not a fancy second pantry — we don’t have any room for an extra set of shelves (all my books are already stacked on all the available shelving in our home, but that’s for research, not hoarding!), so this wonderful second pantry is contained in brown paper shopping bags. It’s not pretty and it’s not really organized. It started off with some form of organization — there was bag for pasta sauce and pasta, a bag for pretzels, almonds and other snack items like microwave popcorn, another bag for flours and sugar. (Yes, I wrote “flours” — my husband has two different types of flours to make his Sunday evening pizza dough, and then we also have all-purpose flour and wheat flour and bread flour — I told you, he’s a hoarder!!)
Now that second pantry is so well stocked, I have only have a general idea which bag an item might be in — and there’s now six brown paper bags sitting on the floor in front of the bookshelf. That’s a ton of pantry to manage, because we also still have the actual pantry in our kitchen where a pantry belongs!! The last time I looked there must be six jars of pickles in the second pantry, but my husband insists on buying a new jar every Sunday when he does our food shopping. And if they don’t have his favorite brand of pickles at that grocery store, then he makes sure he purchases them later on that afternoon at another store in town. That’s right — he makes two separate trips to two different grocery stores in the same afternoon to purchase something that we do not need. Sure, they are pickles, so it’s not like they’ll go bad. I even tried making him pickles last summer from the cucumbers I grew in my garden, but he didn’t like them because they just weren’t like the store-bought ones (hoarder!).
I’m not evening going to talk about the amount of coffee in the second pantry — the last time I checked there might have been 12 bags. Sure he told me that they were on sale, but how are we ever going to use all this coffee?!? It’s not like folks come over any more!
And don’t get me started on the amount of frozen food stored in my freezer…that we will probably never eat because my husband is saving it for an emergency. Sorry, buddy, but I think this pandemic might just qualify as an emergency…
But at least we have pickles!
Notes from a Self Quarantine 