Dad’s personal papers filled filing cabinets and drawers and shelves and box upon box: study notes and drafts of his book Process of Atonement; correspondence; mission papers; journals and memoirs; travel brochures for family vacations; investment and bank statements; tax returns; and much more. As I emptied hanging file folders to shred no-longer-needed papers, I removed the clear plastic label tags and dropped them in an empty desk drawer for later use.  That later use came several days later as I began to create new files for life insurance papers, home and auto insurance papers, pension and health insurance papers, family history records, and others.  But when I pulled open the drawer with the clear tags, I found the drawer empty.  “Mom,” I called out.  “Where are all the file folder tags?”  She looked confused and said nothing.  I retrieved a tag from an active file drawer, and asked her where all the tags I had saved might be, if she knew.  Her confusion turned to embarrassment as she confessed to not knowing what they were so she threw them away.  Why would you do that? I thought.  “Please don’t throw things away just because you don’t know what they are.  Please ask me first.”  She whispered an Okay.  Scraping the dinner dishes into the kitchen trash bin later that day, I found several new clean vacuum filters in the trash.  “Mom.  Why are these new vacuum filters in the garbage can, if you know?”  She had really wanted to clean out the hall closet, she said, [and I hadn’t done it fast enough for her compulsion,] and she didn’t know what they were, she said, so she threw them away, she said.  I told her what they were and put them back in the now-empty closet.

(Image by gugacurado from Pixabay.)