One morning in September I sat down at my desk our dining room table, and paid bills ... both ours and my mom's.
And then I called her electric company to change the bill from Dad's name to her name and to sign up for alerts. Then I called the medical supply company because the bill was MIA, and it turns out they had a problem with their billing company which had double and triple billed some customers. Whew!
And then I determined to balance some figures. That took a lot of detective work!
In attempting my detective work, I had to open the bankers box that was labeled, "Dad's bottom desk drawer," and I found some treasures, the least of which was a printed result of a covid test he had had taken at some point. (That really didn't fit with the rest of the box; perhaps it had slipped down to the bottom drawer from the back of the drawer above.)
This box was lowest on my priority list because it did not appear to be "current business." I found many empty folders, and I found some appliance instruction manuals.
But I also found ...
- a copy of the original deed to the farm,
- the original legal documents outlining when my grandfather purchased a neighboring farm during the Depression at a sale on the courthouse steps,
- a folder of selected letters I had written my parents (possibly from college; I just moved that folder directly to my box of items from the house),
- a 2 page handwritten letter from my dad describing his involvement with 4-H,
- 24 pages mimeographed & stapled together, recounting my mother's elderly cousin's memories of flying from Florida to Tennessee for their uncle's 90th birthday celebration,
- my grandfather's SSN (a few weeks prior I had found a great-aunt's SSN) and the accounting of his estate,
- a 1-page accounting of the sale of some land in 1978, that one of my cousins & I had questions about (questions now answered!), &
- an accident report from the sheriff's department from 2021, when a car once-again took out part of the pasture fence.
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