I have
managed to spend this Memorial Day doing little bits of nothing: reading, a few loads of laundry, Internet
browsing, and eating. (Too bad the last
item does NOT add up to little bits of nothing-calories.) So, late in the afternoon, I decide to do
something other than sit here feeling sad.
Mom’s
organizational skills prior to her dementia were meticulous. Left behind for me to sort through are a four-drawer
file cabinet and three two-drawer file cabinets. I start with the bottom drawer of the cabinet
on wheels, which is marked with a sticky note in Mom’s shaky capital letters:
MISC.
GARDEN
(FAM)
I leaf
through several folders of old warranties and toss most of them. I look through a thick hanging file with
folders marked “Flowers,” “Fertilizer/Water,” “Planting,” “Garden Records,” “Fruit
& Veg & Herb Varieties,” and “Insects/Varmints.” Those folders include everything from article
clippings to lists to hand-drawn garden diagrams. Already it is getting harder to throw things
away, so I hang that folder, minus only a single seed catalog, back in the
cabinet.
And now I
decide that this drawer is worth writing about, so I wheel it out to the living
room by my computer for handy reference. Here are the label
names, as best I can read them, for the last half of the drawer: “Labels,” “O TAN 1-5,” “Archival,” “Archival
Paper,” “Paper,” “Cardboard,” “Lesson Plan Paper,” “Scratch Paper,” and “Tracing
Paper.” In the mysterious “O TAN 1-5”
file are printed donor forms for the Fallasburg Historical Society. The other labels accurately describe their
folders’ contents.
I retrieve a
few pages of lined paper from the “Scratch Paper” file and throw that folder
out. Then I toss the “Cardboard”
contents. But somehow I cannot bear to
part with all of the other paper. After
all, it may come in handy someday, particularly the 200-sheet package of “Ultra
Brights” fluorescent bond paper.
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