Burn Pile Memories

Sorting. 

Thank goodness we put the house on the market way early. In getting things straightened up for showing we were forced early on to begin sorting through our material lives.

An easy place to start was with the two large boxes of tax records. 

While we watched fluffy English language movies during the long nights in early November I would go through folders and envelopes. So many utility bills, bank statements with numbers, but no meaning, so many checks for Scholastic book orders and Girl Scout Cookies. Every now and then there would be an astronomical check for a bonsai tree, a garden pot, an airplane ticket to France. These I would read out loud to Tom and we would be in wonder at what we had been doing at that time, who we were to spend so much money, who were those two people?

After we had reminisced and laughed at those forgotten experiences, 99% of those papers were put into paper bags for disposal. Being Fall the perfect thing to do was to stack all these bags into the garden cart and head on down to the burn pile. As flames caught the bags you could see the papers curling up and then ashes began to float into the air. Big paper ashes.

 Suddenly we both laughed. All those evenings of viewing our past. The chance to recapture memories that had drifted away were again drifting into the ether. What about writing that memoir that could have been pieced together? - now we could create just any ol’ thing we want.