By Gillian Bottrell
Some people file. Others pile.
Piling systems are quite complex, really. A reliable system can work well for years-mine has. Skilled pilers tend to be visual, tactile, and have an incredible memory. Or they remember having one, anyway. Well organized by their own standards, their piles have an order that most would never understand. The important piles don’t even need searching through; its items are memorized. Well, for the most part, anyway.
My system, although it lacks, well, any sort of obvious order, works quite well. It allows a pile to sit in plain view until it is about two, or no more than three, inches high.
First there is a quick run-through to retrieve important pieces. Maybe there is a form to fill out, a nameless phone number, an envelope with a return address from some charity. This pile can be kept in its own pile.
Then I sift through again to get rid of the true junk-things addressed to a former resident, for instance, Don’t worry, I got rid of that pile ages ago.
The rest goes into the kitchen piling cabinet. Others go into the hall piling cabinet-at this stage in the system, the piles are nonspecific. Well, maybe they are at all stages.
All piles start in pieces. They come in the mail, home from school, on the doorknob, from who knows where. Take the dinner table. Clearing this usable surface would require reheating the meal. Whatever has collected since the evening before makes a new pile at the extra place setting. At least it’s neatly stacked now.
In a couple of days, before it hits three inches, it goes into the random cabinet. That’s the cabinet with a lot of three-dimensional piles. Tupperware lids and ugly coffee cups from a vacation resort you’ve never been to.
Before they get into the piling cabinets, however, they stay put for about a month or two, giving me time to get out the real stuff. Well, not really, just to be rearranged. What comes back out goes onto the pile on the piano.
When the time comes, things that still seem important to keep on hand, such as the entire pile, eventually go into a box. I guess I’ll need these things some day, although I don’t really know what for. Usually those boxes go into the closet, undisturbed.
Some small parts of a pile stay around for some reason. Bills due. Bills past due. Bills that are too old to pay, but too interesting to throw away. Others are tall-magazines that are being kept for a reason, then just being kept longer because they were kept at all. Managable piles, or nice-looking ones like magazines, just meander throughout the house.
I can go to the little drawer in the occasional table for those things I need occasionally, like the electric bill, proof of insurance, little pads of blank paper. That antique dresser in the living room? Well, that’s where booklets printed on glossy paper, standard-sized single pages refolded into thirds, and strange or scary-looking unopened envelopes go. That new little piling cabinet above the hall closet? That one migrated from the kitchen and still hasn’t had the second sift-through.
A rough draft, recent homework assignments, an operator’s manual or two, receipts, birthday cards, party invitations, recipes, unopened bank statements, local voting flyers, unused envelopes with scary-looking glue, a date next to some bizarre thing like g.t. bbd 3 times. I just like that one. I like that the paper is getting fragile and turning a cool color. I’ve kept it piled for years. Each pile just contains two or six of each. That pile stays where I put it until I move it again. It merges with other piles and so on and so forth.
After feeling like I have organized them a few more times, they go into a box. If I need something out of it, I just go and get it.
The misunderstood phenomena of being able to go to the right box is why I think the system really works. A warranty for instance. Getting to the right box, to the correct place in the pile, is easy. The warranty and other things that seem interesting will go into another pile while I’m working my way through the box. More likely than not, this pile migrates back into the piling cabinet after the warranty has expired. This is where it gets weird. Piles of good intentions make the rounds until they make it back into the big box.
Some boxes do contain all of one thing. Let me get one. It’s on the top shelf of one of the hallway cabinets. This box is full, literally, of gardening magazines. I only pseudo garden. I was keeping them to make a collage. Oh well, back into the cabinet it goes. There’s a flat box full of school art projects. Don’t worry, they aren’t mine, those are in the garage.
I do have an actual filing cabinet. It’s in the bathroom. It’s full of really organized piles. They were when I made them, anyway. That’s where I keep the first 47 (edited) pages of that teen novel I never have the time to finish. It also has books the kids have written, some more non-wall worthy art projects which haven’t gone into their box just yet. There are piles of official stuff like mortgage papers that should never be boxed. There are school portraits that I buy to put in there. It has old journals and bad poetry. I like to keep that poetry because it is so bad that it is hilarious and I like to read it sometimes.
Don’t get me started on the boxes in the garage. There’s a whole other system at work there. But the boxes are piled in the best way possible. To go through them would add too many elements to the system. I could just recycle them all, but how could I without going through them first?
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Gillian Bottrell is mother of three, wife of one, and owner of Truman the Dog. She works with Special Ed and lives in Watsonville. You can reach her at gillian@charter.net