Pushing Paper

We moved into a smaller house and turned one bedroom into an office with two work stations, one for me and one for Rick. I’ve been organizing and reorganizing since we moved in. We have a storage unit just for files; Rivers Aviation Services files, tax files with back-up receipts on everything, and my research and correspondence files. We also moved a dozen plastic file containers over here, half of which were family information that goes back several generations, all my mother’s diaries, and my journals, most full of interesting quotes.

While standing in line at Mail Boxes, etc. the other day, I saw a gentleman come in with a hand truck piled high with boxes. The clerk greeted him. He tipped his chin hello. “More for the shredder.” Oh, what a lucky man. I started thinking about renting a hand truck or I could use the wheelbarrow I bought to tote manure to the veggie garden.

Lots of people are going “paperless”. Store everything in the cloud. What cloud? Where? And how do you get it out of the cloud? Send up a kite with a retrieval hook? Wait for a rainstorm? All the stuff on my computer is up there somewhere, thanks to my techie son-in-law. If everything crashes, I’m not sure I’d bother retrieving any of it. If I can’t remember what I’ve lost, it probably wasn’t that important in the first place. (I do keep flash drives.)

There is something about sifting through papers like the sands of time, however, not that we have that much time to spare. We’re getting older by the day, and the last thing I want to do with the time I have is push papers around. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

Schedules and lists of things that need to be done. Research notes, computer instructions, scriptures I’ve written out, newspaper articles I’ve snipped out, upcoming conference itineraries, information on container planting, veggie planter box planting, and no-mow-lawn landscaping. For starters.

Sometimes I feel badly about what we’ll leave behind for our children to sort through. Then again, I know what our daughter will do. She’ll get a hand truck and take old files to Mail Boxes, Etc. The clerk will recognize her and smile. “More for the shredder, eh?”

And we won’t miss any of it.