Dorothy, your mother sounds like my mother. After she died, I helped my father clear the enormous house where they had lived for 18 years. There were parts of the cellar where I had not seen the floor since about 1966, and a whole room down there (the door was behind the furnace) that I had not known about -- it was full of bundled Time magazines and stacked firewood.

Emptying that house took me four months of hard labour, many trips to the dump, and an estate sale that the local antique dealers were still talking about five years later.