“The time has come, the time is now,” I declared, waking my husband from his early morning sleep. The desk, the closet, the drawers of clothes under our bed would all be stripped and inspected as we searched for his lost cell phone and did our once every 10 years fall cleaning. The phone had to be there. I had heard its chirping plea for energy before it fell permanently silent.
We would find it. Clothes flew out of the closet, pockets were inspected and declarations made, “You haven’t worn this in ages. This looks stained. You don’t even like to wear this color,” I declared as I tossed shirt after shirt on the bed. “Wait, I like that shirt. I wear that one when I work. I like flannel.”
He said nothing when I tossed the perfectly good shirt in the wrong color on top of the cute luggage I had not used in three or four years of traveling. The desk drawers yielded proof of insurance papers from five years ago. Most landed in the circular file. Retirement papers from a dozen years ago and old wills and legal documents gathered in neat folders to be kept as historical documents reflecting our personal history. Long forgotten letters and children’s art work moved to another area with like-minded articles. We had no explanation for why or how it all had merged in the business desk.
No time to discuss that now. Time now to gather and store what we kept in the proper place in the desk. Wait! Make that the proper place in one of three desks in the house. All are points of collection for what we once considered important papers. Three desks in which to lose items.
Years ago, we had a small desk with slots for filing papers, a larger drawer and a front that dropped to provide a compact work space to use when paying bills.
Bills were paid at the dining room table. The clutter of business gathered in the desk.
We inherited his grandfather’s larger wooden desk with more drawers and cubby holes. It had plenty of storage space and a large front that would drop to rest on wooden braces. His mother gave it to us envisioning him sitting at the desk paying bills. We used it to hold tax information and papers we might want some day.
He paid bills at the dining room table.
He built three desks to hold computers. Two for grown children and one for himself that included a long, pull out extension for holding the piles of papers for bill paying time each month.
He paid bills at the dining room table and stored computer disks in the desk.
A large, wooden banker’s desk with a massive surface area arrived. It had two impressive wooden extensions that slid neatly away when not in use to hold papers. It had file ready drawers and neatly carved wooden trays in the large central drawer. “Lots of space for you keep and pay the bills,” I said. He stored our canceled checks and stamps in the deep desk drawers.
He paid the bills at the dining room table.
The cleaning spree hit all three desks. We found manuals from appliances we no longer owned, bundles of pens and pencils, small tools and odd bits and pieces of paper with no obvious origin.
The search revealed a scattered collection of key chains, nail clippers, dull scissors and old medical records. In our quest to organize and find that phone, I emptied every drawer, turned out the closet and filled the garbage cans. He hauled the clothes and luggage off to the donation center and returned with a new cell phone. The old one remains hidden, somewhere, in an obscure, forgotten spot. It has escaped this fall cleaning and may show up with historical documents in the future, but for now, the time has gone, the time is past and it’s at least nine years to the next fall cleaning.
Joan Hershberger is a staff writer for the El Dorado News-Times.