Prone beneath the dining table, phone pressed to one ear, I played the flashlight beam back and forth in search of a product number. I was on a mission to replace our flood-ruined table’s leaf storage system, one tiny detail in a mountain of flood details, but as with many things disaster-related, this was not proving easy.
I remarked to the store designer on the other end of the phone line that I had not lain on this particular floor since we bought this house in 1988.
“That year featured a scorcher of a summer,” I told her, “and the dining room doubled as a playground for our two small children. It was impossible to be outdoors.” An odd conversation from an even odder vantage point, but the designer bore with me.
I crawled out from my mahogany canopy, no wiser for the effort, and snapped photos of the table. The designer would continue to investigate. Plodding wearily up the stairs, I settled with a sigh in front of my file drawers to search through decades of receipts.
Organization may be one of my strong suits, but throwing things out is not. I label, I file, I sort, and I store, but had forgotten how useful this could be when forced to complete an insurance claim loss report. I found product labels, receipts, and even invoices for the flood-ruined chairs we bought at McFinn’s in downtown Naperville, a store long ago shuttered.
I unearthed our oldest cat’s adoption papers from the Naperville Humane Society, and recalled how our children would not allow us to change her moniker at the time, even though she was just a numbered cat living in a crate bearing that name.
Most interesting was finding our Mayflower Transit Household Inventory. We didn’t have much back then, but what we had, we cherished. Maybe this is why I keep records. Past chapters illuminate the developing path of our lives.
