I save email messages almost to a fault and that fault is that often when I am looking for something I sent or received two or three or six (or 20!) years in the past, it isn’t always all that easy to find. Most often that’s because I could *swear* that I wrote a very specific word/phrase but when I *finally* by hook or by crook find the blasted email message I’m looking for, it usually turns out that I *didn’t* actually write that word/phrase. Either that or I “remember” writing/receiving a message oh, say June 2013 and it turns out that I actually wrote/received it in May 2012. So much for my memory.

One of my prodjects for this winter has been to try to organize the morass of email messages (and a few facebook posts and text messages) from the period surrounding my mother’s death, which happened four years ago this month. This is a massive dredging prodject and often an extremely painful one. I think that the reason I haven’t tried to tackle it until now is because it was too upsetting.

It is still upsetting but I did save all that stuff and nowadays I feel more like I am putting pieces of a puzzle together. I can stow the pain off to the side, so I am getting through it and when I am finished with it, I will have a tagged, easily searchable archive of the events surrounding The Commander’s illness, death, and the aftermath. It’ll be there for her grandchildren if I don’t decide to jettison it at some point. Or maybe give it to the Hare Krishnas. I may and I can if I want to because it belongs to meeeeee. That is, I may delete it at some point. I doubt that the Hare Krishnas would have any use for it (not to mention the Comm’s grandchildren).

In the process, I stumble upon unrelated emails that make me LAUGH OUT LOUD! Like this quote from a message I wrote to my BFF about flinging books:

We did end up removing one small children’s popup book — [insert child’s name here] had drawn a picture of a [insert aminal here] on EVERY page.

I’ll let you guess which child and what kind of aminal. I’ll just say that it was the child who used art supplies (crayons, pencils, pens, paint, markers, GLITTER GLUE(!!!)) on just about every single blasted surface in her path EXCEPT PAPER! Boy oh boy do I miss those days! Yes, really I do, make no mistake. Markers on skin? Again? After I just washed your legs off? Really? “It’s okay mama, it’s all dried off now.” And so I packed up my [insert child’s name here] and took her to the annual company pic-a-nic, markered-up legs and all. This frazzled young mother presented her young daughter to her co-workers with pride that day. Maybe she had a glimmer of a clue about the artist that kid would become.

P.S. I have no clue which popup book it was.

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