Thirty Years and Three States

            It’s probably been thirty years and three states since I thoroughly cleaned out a particular two-drawer file cabinet, but I felt ruthless enough to do it Saturday.  It’s amazing what the prospect of getting new flooring in the bedrooms and hallway can inspire me to do.

            I dumped entire folders such as “maps” and “KPERS” (Kansas Public Employees Retirement System newsletters dating back to 1989).  I threw out the old brochures from a homeschooling program I planned to use for my daughter’s kindergarten year back in 1987-88.  Out went church annual reports from the 1990s along with an unbelievable accumulation of warranties for items I no longer own.  I even threw out a stray year of mostly empty planner pages (after reading through them, of course).

            Naturally, I kept the important stuff:  things like pictures, copies of my Christmas letters going back to 1979, and treasured special occasion cards (including the Mother’s Day letter my daughter wrote me when she was nineteen, and the drug-free Kansas red ribbon with “Best Mom in the world badge” at the top in my son’s grade school script).  Among other things, I re-filed college transcripts, the 1974 career testing results that showed I would make a great priest or male English professor, and dental X-rays. 

            So now what used to be crammed into two file drawers comfortably fits into one.  My old, dented metal cabinets have been replaced by a two-drawer lateral file, but a lingering homesickness remains for people and places of long ago.