The neighbors would stop him as he passed by their homes. Usually they were little things but they always came with a story. Groundhog thought they were real treasures even if the neighbors who gave things to him thought differently.

“I really don’t want this any more,” said Rabbit as she handed Groundhog a ball. It was the size of a baseball. “It has very bad memories for me. Once a couple of boys threw this and a few other balls like it at me. I think they wanted to hurt me so I had to run for my life. Please take this bad memory away. I don’t know why I kept it anyway.”

Groundhog put it in his bag. It did seem a little heavier than it should be, maybe because of the memories Rabbit had attached to it.

Groundhog started to pass Turtle’s house which could have been anywhere since Turtle carried his house on his back. Today it was right on Groundhog’s path. Before he got by, Turtle peeked out.

“Hey Groundhog! I need you to take something.” With that, Turtle pulled out a fishing hook and dropped it into Turtle’s bag. Even though it was just a fish hook, it seems to land in the bag with a thud.

“Wow,” said Groundhog. “What kind of fish hook is that? It sounds so heavy.”

“Just an ordinary one. It should be very light. I don’t want to have it around anymore because it still scares me.”

“Why would such a little hook scare you?” wondered Groundhog out loud.

“Well, when I was swimming in the pond one day, my foot got caught on it. It was very painful. I limped for days. I thought I’d keep it as a reminder to be more careful but I just get angry at it because of the memory.”

Groundhog went on his way. Here and there other neighbors stopped him to give him things. Some were big things. Some were small things. They were all treasures to Groundhog. He didn’t have a ball before and he could use the shiny fish hook to hang a plant from his ceiling. The other things were just as cool. Robin put something in the bag that reminded Robin of something sad. The frogs had another angry thing.

By the time Groundhog started back to his house, the bag was very full and very heavy. It was so heavy that he couldn’t carry it on his back like he had when he started out. He had to get behind it and push it along or get in front of it and try to pull it along.

Groundhog’s home, as you can imagine from his name, was underground. He was good at digging tunnels and large rooms. As he collected more and more, he had dug deeper and deeper to make more hallways and more rooms. Now, as he stood at the front door of his home ready to take in his latest bag he had a problem. It’s not that the bag was too big and too heavy even though it was that. No, the problem was that from all the times Groundhog had gone out and collected other people’s stuff, there was so much to store that he had run out of room to put the stuff he had collected that day! In fact, he couldn’t even squeeze today’s bag through the front door because the home was so crowded.

Groundhog sat outside his front door wondering what to do. It seemed to him that he had gotten smaller and smaller when the heavy loads he had carried had weighed him down. His home looked smaller too. It was so crowded with all this neighbors’ stuff – their balls of sorrow, hooks of pain and so much more, that he had no room in his own home for his own stuff.

He wondered why he had taken on everyone else’s stuff and filled up his home with it instead of making his own home like he would like it.

Groundhog knew what he had to do. He took the bag which he couldn’t even push into his home and put it in the trash. Then he stepped through the front door and filled another bag and put it into the trash. Again and again, bag by bag, room by room, he cleaned out the house of other people’s stuff.

Now Groundhog had lots of extra space when all the neighbors’ stuff was cleaned out. He made one clean room a living room where he could invite his neighbors just to play.

It seemed to Groundhog that he had grown now that he wasn’t weighed down by the heavy loads of everything his neighbors wanted to get rid of. Since his own home was now empty of everyone else’s stuff, he was more comfortable and even that made him feel bigger.

One day Mrs. Snail and Tuddle Turtle were visiting, they liked what Groundhog had done. Tuddle said: “If you want to grow, have fun with your neighbors but don’t let them give you the stuff that’s bothering them because it will get too heavy for you to carry around.”

“I agree,” said Mrs. Snail. ”If you fill your house with their stuff, there will be no room for you to grow into with your very own things!”

When his groundhog relatives came around and complained about taking on too much of their neighbors’ stuff, Groundhog had one thing to tell them: for you and fill your house so much that