 she has stuck to her promise and has not acquired any new animals and is being monitored by local authorities.
Awesome work, Dr. Zas, Dr. Patty, and Matt. That was rough.
Boy, if there was ever a kookier, more interesting gal on this show, I sure can’t remember. Well, okay, I just need to go back a season, but hey, this lady is a corker. Adelle is free spirit and quite the crack up. She’s also deeply, deeply into her mental illness of hoarding. Adelle is an older woman, retired, and calls herself a “big time hoarder!” with relish. She is the queen of adapting. No way to wash clothes inside? No problem, there’s a kiddie pool and a hose. The toilet stops flushing? Watering can filled in the tub and if you pour it just right, you can get it to swirl down the drain. Cat litter buckets make fantastic impromptu toilets, did you know? Sure the hoard has spread outside, sure it’s incredibly unsanitary, but she carries on with a smile and a joke.
It’s no joke to her children, though. Both grown, and both incredibly bitter – the joie de vivre seems to have skipped a generation – neither her daughter Mary nor her son Dirk are willing to take her in when her house will be condemned (if nothing is done). “She would bring us down,” they both say. There’s not a lot of love lost here for their mother.
She’s always been a hoarder, we learn, but her divorce to her children’s father amplified it to a point where the children were removed from her care. We’ve seen this before: the sheer resentment at being put aside for the sake of “things” drives a hard wedge between children and mother. And I get it. Adelle gets it, too. Well, as much as she’s able. She knows that a part of her hoarding is her trying to cram things into the empty space in her heart where her children once were.
This isn’t Adelle’s first clean up. She has a social worker, Lisa. Lisa had five different agencies from the county show up just to clean her kitchen. It took five days. Five teams, and five days. Adelle smiles and says that the kitchen stayed clean, too! For…two? Three whole days? Oh, this is going to be a tough one.
The jovial Mark Pfeffer arrives; she immediately calls him Dr. Pepper. And then she starts flirting. It’s really harmless, and he knows it, but he also wants her to know that he’s here to work and she’s being inappropriate. She starts telling him that she studied Microbiology back in school and uses those “sterile procedure” techniques to prepare her food and keep things clean.
“That’s certainly the comment of a career hoarder if I ever heard one,” he laughs later on the camera.
She proudly shows him her slop bucket in the kitchen (that also doubles as a make-shift commode). She teaches him how she “flushes” the toilet when she’s in the filthy bathroom. She displays her beautiful spider web up in the corner that “catches more flies than I could.” Mark takes it all in, and it’s a lot to take in.
How much do you want to bet that this is the way he talked as a kid when he was taken away from his mother? He looks like he’s a successful adult, but here he is nothing but the embodiment of arrested development.
Dorothy brings this all to Mark’s attention, who puts them into a bit of role play. Switch roles, and talk to the other person. It breaks down to Mary being bossy and Adelle being flaky. Mary, as her mom, starts yelling about elder abuse, which shocks Adelle. This is how her children see her? Yep. They think she’s distant, focused on herself, and selfish.
Speaking of, Dirk doesn’t show up on time and is a petulant baby about it when Dorothy calls him out.
Dirk: Don’t light into me! I call my own shots.
Mark: No one is blaming you. Just help us help her.
At that Dirk walks off without another word. That should help… Mary tries to defend him, saying that it’s how her brother copes – he walks off.
That is not coping. That is avoiding. Coping is how you deal before you resolve problems. There is no resolution of problems in this family, which is the main problem.
They all address the real problem, the abandonment they felt by her, and her inability to actually control her hoarding, and decide to get back to the clean up. 6800 pounds of garbage are removed from the house, no small thing. Mary takes her mother to a salon for a makeover, and Adelle comes out – no joke – looking about twenty years younger. The crew used that time to clean up the house and arrange Adelle’s furniture and other things to make the house look like a proper home and not a city dump.
When she sees her things looking so lovely, she says that she promises to not “back slide.” She is tickled at her home looking nice for a change. She now has a useable kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.
Things were removed from the home, but it seems there’s still a huge blockage in the doorway in the shape of her relationship with her children. That is going to take a lot longer than four days to repair, unfortunately.
Adelle continues to bring things into the house and is having difficulty letting go of more items. She is working on this, though, with a therapist and organizer.
This is going to be the one we come back to visit and find that it’s gone back to the original state, I bet.
I was talking to my husband about the episode (he can’t watch the animal hoarders) and realized that this show is responsible for a huge portion of my growth as an empathetic adult. I don’t mean that I was a jerk or anything before Hoarders, just that my knee-jerk reaction to some of these behaviors was to look away with disgust, to not try and understand why people do what they do.
Obviously I don’t condone abuse. But this show breaks down the human condition in such an “in your face” way that you can’t help but learn. We have women that have been physically assaulted who build literal walls of garbage in their house. People who see loved ones die in traumatic ways that affect their ability to deal with all the stages of death and grief. People whose homes have burned down, who have been robbed, abandoned, abused, all of the awful things that can happen to our fellow human beings. And the connection gets made between the trauma and the resulting behavior.
The more we see, the more we learn about how people react to their world, the more we can learn about ourselves. I know, I know, this is all obvious to many of you, but I just wanted to take a moment to commend this show for really opening my eyes to so much more than just a mess. I’m not here for any rubber-necking. I’m here to bear witness to the human condition and learn more about who we are as a species, honestly.
Malachi Pearson asks the Morganton City Council about the future of the Confederate statue housed on the lawn of the Historic Burke County Courthouse.
The lower level of Collett Street Recreation Center was full of socially-distanced city residents, staff and council members Tuesday night as the city council sought to discuss any issues that citizens wanted to hear about.
Councilman Chris Jernigan said that he hoped the town hall style meeting would become a regular occurrence, provided conditions remain safe to hold such gatherings.
Here’s a look at what residents and the council discussed at the meeting.
Even more prominent on the city square now that trees surrounding it have been cut down or trimmed, the Confederate statue remains a constant topic of discussion in the city.
That much was apparent as multiple citizens brought up their concerns about the statue and the June 27 demonstration that saw people with guns surround it.
The simple answer is yes, at least for now.
The council and city staff have said that, since they only lease that portion of the Historic Courthouse Square from the county, their hands are tied when it comes to the removal of the statue.
In July, the county told The News Herald that its hands were tied because of North Carolina General Statute 100-2.1, a law passed in 2015 that made it illegal for any objects of remembrance on public property to be permanently removed, except for instances where the monument is being cleaned or for construction, renovation, reconfiguration or transportation projects.
There is a clause of that law which would allow the removal of a monument if it is owned by a private party but located on public property. The private party would be responsible for the removal.
City Manager Sally Sandy said the city and city council have suggested to the county that a roundtable meeting of sorts be held, where those on all sides of the issue of the statue could come together and discuss possible negotiations, but that meeting hasn’t happened yet.
Concerns also were expressed about the lack of charges pressed against those who showed up to the square in June with guns.
Morganton Department of Public Safety Chief Tony Lowdermilk addressed those concerns, and said that, with so many people present, there would not have been a way for investigators to make sure