To Go Through

A standing joke in my parents' house was the phrase "To Go Through" scribbled in marker across the top of a cardboard box. It meant a reprieve for my mother, a postponement of the not-always inevitable; for my dad it meant more clutter.

Mom wasn't a hoarder, but she never saw a box she couldn't fill. And she didn't fill them in an organized way. They were stuffed hurriedly, before a party or the arrival of visitors, and pell-mell, with a jumble of newspapers, junk mail and the occasional treasure — an envelope of photos or handwritten note.

Though Mom did have time in later years to go through some of these boxes, to sort and toss (though never as much of the latter as Dad would have liked), there were still plenty of these "to go through" boxes when she and Dad were both gone.

I went through a few of them last weekend. There were birthday cards, a spool of gold thread, the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader with the banner headline "Clinton Impeached." There were notebooks and ledgers and an ancient bill from my college infirmary when I had strep throat my senior year.

Did these discoveries "spark joy"? Sometimes. More often, they sparked tears. But after a couple of hours I had winnowed the contents of two boxes into one. I had "gone through." And that was good enough for me.