23rd
“A Very Nice Pumpkin”
The best episode of Hoarders I’ve seen so far is “Jennifer & Ron/Jill,” from the first season. Part of what makes the episode so great is that it features Dr. David Tolin, who is remarkably patient, kind, and capable of listening to and engaging with Jill, one of the program’s most difficult and interesting hoarders. It’s a shame that, (as far as I know), he hasn’t been back on the show—they seem to be using “Certified Professional Organizers” instead of researchers and Ph.D.s in Clinical Therapy…
I also like the episode because Jill reminds me a lot of my grandmother, the great, late Grandma Fontaine, matriarch (mother of five, grandmother of sixteen), antiques dealer,* poet, hoarder, dog-owner and likely (middle) namesake of my unborn (and un-conceived) daughter and dedicatee of my unfinished (but at least begun) dissertation. Like Jill, who had fly tape hanging from the fan in her living room, Grandma Fontaine affixed fly tape to the lighting fixtures above the kitchen table in Maine and the dining room table in Newton.
My family used to stay in a trailer on Fontaine’s property in Maine, and I would wake up before everyone else and run barefoot across the cold dewey grass to go to Fontaine’s and eat sugar cereal—stuff my mom would never buy. This was a small rebellion—I was supposed to check with my mom before eating anything there, because an uncle had once discovered decades-old mayonnaise in the fridge, a cousin had gotten worms from eating lamb at her house in Newton, and once after the house had been closed all winter, my dad went up to Maine and found the remains of a roast chicken abandoned in the oven…
Like Jill in Hoarders, Fontaine was almost charmingly defensive, she had a certain pride in her habits, as though she were a lone crusader mocked in a world populated by ignorant, wasteful sloths brainwashed by consumer culture to be paranoid about bacteria. 
In my favorite scene from the episode, Tolin points out the flies and asks Jill, “Do you have any sense of what that might be about?” He gives her a hint: “You know sometimes when you get a strong smell and a lot of flies buzzing around it means that there is something rotting.”
Jill swears that, though there are some rotting apples in the kitchen, there is no rotten food in the living room. Tolin looks conspicuously across the room, and as the camera follows his gaze, zooming in on a rotting pumpkin, Jill concedes: “Oh, I’m sorry, the pumpkin! It was a very nice pumpkin when it was fresh!”
Tolin listens patiently to her banter about farmers’ markets and produce as they make their way across the room, but shows a flicker of checked disgust upon encountering what seems to be another pumpkin: “I think I just stepped on… What is it, more pumpkin?” Jill clarifies: “That’s a different one. It went bad. That’s a squash. I had forgotten about that.”
* We discovered that Fontaine was an antiques dealer posthumously when, cleaning out her house—an operation that required the participation of a considerable number of her five children and sixteen grandchildren—we found business cards she must have had made up so that she could get better deals at flea markets and junk shops. I’ll dig one up and scan it for a future post…
