With the help of family and volunteers, Jed Smith and his mother, Martha, have made noticeable progress in cleaning up their two properties that Lyme officials have asserted for years violate the town’s zoning ordinance.

The Smiths have removed five unregistered vehicles, filled three dumpsters with scrap metal and construction materials and hauled away two pickup truck loads of old tires for recycling.

But is it too little, too late?

Selectboard Chairwoman Judith Brotman is expected to inspect the properties on Dorchester Road and Goose Pond Road in the next week or so. After Brotman reports back to board colleagues David Kahn and Ben Kilham on what she finds, the three will decide the town’s next move.

As I wrote in mid-August, the Selectboard had given the Smiths a deadline of Aug. 31 to clear their properties of, among other things, two dozen unregistered vehicles, tires and mounds of debris. Each property has a dilapidated home that hasn’t been lived in for years.

The deadline was imposed after voters at Town Meeting in March approved spending up to $150,000 to hire an outside company to “remove the materials stored on the properties,” if the Smiths failed to do it themselves.

The warrant article passed, 80-51. Coupled with a Grafton County Superior Court judge’s ruling that dates back to 2015, the board seems on firm legal ground to take control of cleaning up the properties.

Still it’s fair to say that residents remain divided over whether the town should essentially seize the belongings of a hardscrabble family with roots in the community that go back more than a century.

Both properties are eyesores, which doesn’t sit well with some residents in one of the state’s wealthiest communities. Others in town have a live-and-let-live attitude.

Martha Smith’s father, Lon Pike, had a small farm on the 17-acre parcel adjacent to Dorchester Road, which leads to the Dartmouth Skiway. Jed Smith and his late wife, Catherine, raised their two young children in a mobile home on Goose Pond Road. After Catherine died suddenly of heart failure inside the home at age 31 in 2014, Jed and the children couldn’t bear to live there. It’s sat empty since.

Jed is a mechanically-talented jack-of-all-trades. He takes pride in fixing up old cars and trucks that most people would give up on. Along with performing property maintenance, he works at Norwich’s transfer and recycling center. If someone is throwing out a broken lawnmower or grass trimmer, he’ll often take it off their hands.

While others consider her son a hoarder, Martha Smith, 68, sees him as the ultimate recycler in a society that is too quick to dispose of unwanted items. “Just because you throw things away, doesn’t mean they go away,” she said. “They likely end up in the Lebanon landfill.”

Jed Smith, 45, says he’s not like the people portrayed in reality shows about hoarders. “I’m all for cleaning up,” he said. “It will make me more efficient.”

While showing me around the Dorchester Road property in July, he pointed to a pile of vehicle parts. “To the untrained eye, it all looks like junk that’s not worth saving, but I can find a use for it,” he said.

At a Selectboard meeting on Thursday, the Smiths asked for additional time to complete what everyone agrees is a daunting task.

After reading about the Smiths’ plight, more people from Lyme and other Upper Valley communities began pitching in. “People are getting their gloves on and doing the work with us,” Jed told the board. “The support we’ve gotten has been overwhelming.”

Kahn asked the Smiths about how much more time they’d need to finish the cleanup, if the deadline was extended. Jed Smith suggested they be given an additional month before the town reassessed the situation.

The Smiths acknowledged they got off to a slow start, after the board informed them in April that they had roughly 4½ months to pull off the cleanup. The outpouring of support in recent weeks “got us going,” Martha Smith told the board. “It made us understand that people care.”

At Thursday’s meeting, the Smiths thanked longtime Lyme resident Ray Clark, a builder and developer, who began organizing the community’s volunteer effort after the Town Meeting vote.

When asked by Brotman to speak, Clark opted instead to hand the board a one-page letter. It was a blunt assessment of the situation to say the least.

“I think I can speak for the volunteers in saying that this has been a frustrating exercise,” Clark wrote. “We have tried to help fellow citizens in a time of need, but feel they lack the awareness of the situation they have created and the ability to overcome the physical and emotional hurdles which are in front of them.”

An extension of a month or two could suffice in finishing the cleanup of the half-acre Goose Pond Road property, Clark wrote. But he was skeptical that cleaning up the Dorchester Road property, where two dozen unregistered vehicles remained this week, was doable without the town hiring a private junk hauler.

The small group of volunteers spearheading the cleanup effort since spring includes several health care professionals who have encouraged Jed Smith to seek treatment for his hoarding tendencies, Clark said.

“Jed has had many challenges and hardships in his life,” Clark wrote to the board. “He is a hard worker and struggles to support his family. He also has psychological barriers to overcome. We attempted to connect him with a therapist and help him pay for this, but this offer was never taken up, even though he said he wanted to pursue it.”

After leaving the board meeting, I caught up with Jed in the parking lot of the the town office building. He held a copy of Clark’s letter, which he had just seen for the first time.

“It’s not my nature to ask for help,” he said, before heading off to do more cleanup work.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.