Long-term storage

 In the corner of my home office, a tower of wicker boxes containing most but not all of our important papers is on the verge of collapse. The cat has made it her scratching post and has shredded them. 

It is not ideal. 

I have made it my mission this midwinter moment to move them and wrangle some of the other records that require added attention. 

For all that the computer age promised, it certainly did not eliminate clutter. 

Conventional wisdom now tells us that clutter, or the overabundance of possessions that created chaotic living spaces as they accumulate in our lives, lives in a kind of lockstep with depression. 

Many of those studying the impact clutter has on our mental well-being will tell you how it might affect men and women differently. 

It maybe won't surprise you, if you harken back to the 1950s ideal of a single-family dwelling in a well-manicured subdivision, when a man came home, kicked off his shoes, accepted a drink from his dutiful wife, and retired to his recliner with this evening paper, his home was a kingdom ... a place for him to unwind. 

His wife - having already worked all day and who had disappeared to rearrange his shoes - was not merely a caretaker in this domain, but probably felt as such as she began the opening salvo in the evening shift of menial drudgery. 

Everything has its place.

Honestly, I don't know anyone in the living world - past or present - who resembles these descriptions. Certainly not my parents who struggled with bouts of seasonal depression amid a lifetime of scattered preparedness.

And as we move along in the thing called life, our proud moments and our due diligence seem to haunt us as much as our mistakes. 

It's something I've been thinking about since my father died and bequeathed to his children all of his earthly treasures, which, it turns out, contain far more letter-sized printouts than one might imagine that live in unmarked shoeboxes growing like stalagmites all over the house.

Is it any wonder we are still drowning in paper? Documents we must shred to the consistency of fine-grain sand to keep thieves and scoundrels from reconstituting their remains into an identity one could readily steal. 

These record tombs span decades and cover all manner of subjects from midcentury pay stubs to millennial medical payments, some of which mix topics and years within the same compostable file. 

Conventional wisdom tells us to keep our financial records for seven years to ten thousand years ... or perhaps longer, lest the mystical rubric of unforeseen possibilities haunts our descendants. 

Which, undoubtedly, it had as I sifted through envelopes to find the Deeds of this father as well as a few of the old light bills, too. 

I tuck them back into the file and stow the file into a box I label descendants. 

I've done enough decluttering for this winter, and maybe enough for two (or maybe even nine) lifetimes.