important_shit tender_square she’d been putting off organizing paper, the category marie kondo said was the most challenging to sort, for nearly three years. her makeshift system directed paper into three buckets—to shred, to file, and for keepsakes—but there was no subsequent movement. the piles grew and the documents aged and the filing cabinet her mother gave her at the start of her retirement remained empty, save for a few documents. she believed her system was fairly foolproof, until she couldn’t find an important receipt for an appliance purchase she needed to initiate a return on. it turned out she had put the bill of sale in the shred pile. so, she scoured all her tucked away hiding spots and examined every sheet, making a fan of piles around her as she sat on the floor, for banking, for the car, for the house, for taxes, for shredding, etcetera. she got a pen and renamed the folders so that there would be no mistaking what their contents were: medical documents, irs correspondence, warranties and product information for gadgets in the house. she divided the contents amongst two drawers: the bottom contained all their marital paperwork, joint assets and house-related documents; the top contained all the paperwork that was specific to him. she reorganized her own documents into an accordion folder she’d had since she was single, a red rectangular briefcase she’d take with her when she walked out the door for the last time. when they first met, her husband carried around a cardboard carton that was a mess of essential papers, calling it his “important shit” box. he had carted it across three different states. once they started living together, she tackled the contents, determining what he needed and what he could part with. she wrote a poem about it once concluding, “we are responsible for what we tame.” in their eight years together, their paper pile had grown exponentially. she was the spouse who knew where everything was; he could call her with a question and she could give him exact directions to locate what was required. with paper, she wanted to set him up with the best system possible, a place where he could find what he needed when he needed it, when she was no longer around to ask. 220424 what's it to you? who go blather from