The other day I bought a filing cabinet off Craig’s List.

Not your average janky metal office furniture jobby, this filing cabinet is a deep faux mahogany affair that can easily pass as a classy end table. Up until now, my files have all been stashed in a cheap plastic box under my desk, which has not suited my Virgo sensibilities at all.  When I found this sweet new filing cabinet on Craig’s List, I hightailed it three towns north to lay claim. In a cozy suburban neighborhood infested with noxious Christmas light displays, I handed over $60 and batted my eyelashes while a hunky dad hoisted it into my trunk.

“Buy filing cabinet” was just one small item on my ever-expanding domestic To Do List. You’d think I would have been able to check that one off and move on to the next. “Weed garden” has been lingering for months, and “clean closet” is looming large. But getting the file cabinet in my car was just the beginning of the adventure.

This 3,000 pound cabinet, with its incongruous shape and impressive heft, proved too big for the spot I had planned, and so began the creative process of moving every single piece of furniture in my home-office-kitchen-living-room-one-room-cottage to try to make things work. In the process, I was forced to reconsider the permanence of the four moving boxes that for an embarrassing number of years have been languishing inconspicuous in the corner under a handwoven Quechuan tapestry that someone once gave me.

Inside those boxes: 35 years worth of handwritten journals. 

I am not by any means a hoarder. I like to throw things out. Neither am I largely sentimental. But I am attached to these journals. I’m a writer, and I always have been since I first learned to write at the age of 5. These cloth and paper-bound books represent a lifetime of emoting, analyzing and diagramming, but also comprise possible future memoir material. At times in my life my journal was not only my confidant and confessor, but my closest friend. I guard these volumes ferociously. No one has ever read them (except perhaps one particularly deviant boyfriend in college) and their contents are the only secret I have in the world.

So I was aghast to discover that most of them were covered with a fine gauze of mold. In Northern California, where I live, things are damp. Once I lost a half a closet full of shoes to the scourge. So I should have known. I should have stuffed silicon packets into these boxes years ago. It never occurred to me.

 

Panicked, I abandoned my plans for that night and instead spent hours taking the journals out of the boxes and meticulously wiping down the covers, one by one, with a chamois dipped in vinegar water. Obsessively I cleaned the cloth and laid each book down, spine open, on the various surfaces in my house, cranked high the heat, and prayed.

Later, exhausted (and hot), I collapsed on the couch beside a low table teeming with drying journals. In no particular order, I began to pick them up and read.

It had been a long, moldy time since I had revisited these entries.

I was enthralled. I went back inside the mind of that 22-year-old girl, nearly two decades later, and with the more sensible and battered heart of a 40-year-old woman I found regret, and compassion. That girl, who suffered so much and so ardently, over things that really did not matter all that much… I wanted so badly to hug her and look her in the eye and tell her, listen! It’s all going to be okay! This boyfriend… he is not good enough for you. That job… quit it! The cough your kitty has that so worries you? Yes, it’s cancer, and she will die from it. But not for many years, and in the meantime, enjoy her. Give her more attention. Give yourself more attention. And maybe give that stupid boyfriend a little less! And stop reading Sylvia Plath poetry, mmmkay?

I got lost for a while in the tortured mind of young, depressed me. But finally, the journals dry, the covers clean, I packed them away in a new place, a more permanent place, and threw out the old cardboard boxes they had lived in. And then I turned to my screen and I began to type. For in twenty years, I hope I’ll look back on these entries I’m making now and think, oh, to be forty again! So young and so free! And so organized!