The List keeper

I have a drawer that I toss all paperwork into with the intention of filing it away at a later date. It could be months, sometimes longer, but eventually it finds a new home. When the drawer won’t close properly, I know it’s time to start organizing, a task that can take anywhere from two to three hours. Each time I face the drawer I vow, once again, to “file, not pile” in the future. Well, another season has gone by since I last filed, and (Surprise! Surprise!) the drawer stopped closing last week. And, true to form, it took me almost three hours to straighten, purge and file. It’s a mindless task and one that I don’t relish. However, on this occasion I actually made a delightful discovery. As the papers were flying around me, my mother’s handwriting flashed before my eyes and I smiled.




You see, Mom was a list keeper, a recorder of information. She was the most organized woman I’ve ever known. As far back as I can remember she kept a calendar hanging in an easily accessible place, usually in the kitchen, where she recorded everything: upcoming activities and appointments, meeting dates and times, long-distance phone calls made, our vacations, and special events. In her purse was a smaller version of the house calendar, as well as a notepad filled with to-do lists for groceries, needed school supplies, clothing options for our spring/fall school shopping sprees, church committee notes, birthday lists, and more. The refrigerator was decorated with magnets, each holding an individual reminder in plain view, including my personal favorite, the dinner menus – a single piece of paper stuck on the refrigerator and filled with two to three weeks of meal planning. The comings and goings of our daily family life was well-documented and we always knew where we were supposed to be, at what time, and who with.

It’s evident that Mom rubbed off on us since my sisters and I are also list keepers, each to varying degrees. Out of all of us, I probably record the most extensive amount of minutiae. I have several fully noted calendars; my work areas at home and the church office are covered with sticky notes, note pads and scraps of papers all informing me of something. I usually don’t think much about it because it feels so normal to me, merely an extension of my mother. In fact, I have kept a thick stack of Mom’s dinner menus and quite a few years of her calendars. Somehow it makes me feel more connected to her even though she’s been gone for fifteen years. Of course, after plowing through that drawer, I have no idea why I kept my old notes with information that was no longer usable; my mother didn’t even do that. Hmmmmmm – Wait a minute! Maybe I need to make a note to look into that.