Every so often, I clean drawers out.
People that know me and visit my house believe that I am an orderly, neat person.
That's nice of them. I am okay with them and their beliefs.
Those people don't open drawers at my house. Some of their beliefs about me are built on shifty ground and bad intel.
Almost daily, I shove stuff in drawers to tidy up. Later, I cannot find anything because I don't pay attention to where I shove things. Because of this long standing habit, I own no less than thirteen $5 pairs of sunglasses (and can tell you where two are) and twenty-two toe-nail clippers.
Monday I was cleaning out drawers in search of a birth certificate and some vaccination records. Finding something like that means dumping out six or seven drawers in a few different rooms and locations.
If you are in the right head-space for it, this excercise can be fun. It's like a treasure hunt because you don't know what any given search might turn up.
The search ended with papers strewn everywhere, most of which just needed to be pitched into the trash. In the last folder, at the bottom of the desk drawer, I almost missed this one, a letter sent to me in 2009.
The news and happenings of life over the last several weeks have left me off-balance - stuck in the dark - feeling like Sam ... not really wanting to know the end, because how can the end be happy?
It was good to clean out a drawer and find Phoebe's birth certificate. It was even better to be reminded that in the end, it is only a passing thing, this shadow. We must all remember to hold on because there is some Good in this world, and it is worth fighting for.
