The Paper Lake

photo courtesy of Spencer Greet

I sit here surrounded by a vast sea of dead trees, adrift in a paper lake. It covers every surface I see.

The floor. The chair next to me. The drop-down desk.

If I move, I will step on a checking account statement, or a PECO bill.

I am held in bondage by white bond.

I decided that instead of our annual frantic and unseemly scramble for tax records in April (which, of course, is the cruellest month, as T.S. Eliot informed us) I would get the jump on the situation by starting in January.

The problem is, I do not have a good relationship with paper, unless it is bound into book form, and then I pretty much worship it, or at least the words written on it.

Miscellaneous pieces of paper that come in the mail I do not like. They multiply in ways that are objectionable to me. They require judgment and organization to deal with, two qualities that I do not possess in abundance.

Going through the mail is a chore to be avoided as long as possible. I have to focus on the individual item of mail and decide what it is and what to do with it, an agonizing task for a Myers-Briggs personality type of INFP (for you Myers-Briggs fans, at some point I will revisit this fascinating topic). After many years of dealing badly with this task, I have learned to carefully scrutinize and sort incoming mail into the following hierarchy of importance:

• A greeting card – most important, open immediately. Someone cares!

• A bill – open, wince, stash on the bill pile, even though I pay my bills online for the most part.

• A magazine - stack on the coffee table to read later, unless it is Good Housekeeping, which is stored in the powder room (read "library".)

• A statement – pile up unopened, since I do all of my banking online, but cannot bring myself to eliminate the paper statements. I am a belt-and-suspenders kind of gal.

• A catalog – stack on the coffee table, grumbling about the fact that although I do all of my shopping online, a Luddite in my household prefers to use catalogs, which take up space, and use paper, which I don’t like.

• A request for a donation that includes return address labels – pile unopened until labels are needed (I donate to charities, but not just because they send me labels).

• Anything else – toss in the junk mail bin after a few anxious minutes spent wondering whether to open or not.

After I pay bills, I stack the residual paper on a pile that includes any other piece of business that we do during the course of the year. So, by the end of the year, I have a three-inch-high stack of paper that is an archeological dig whenever a specific bill/statement/invoice needs to be referenced. I also have a pile of unopened statements.

Then April comes, and …

Perhaps this will be the year that I stop squirreling away all of these sheets of paper, the vast majority of which are never referenced again after they are filed. They are, after all, mostly a backup system for online transactions. Perhaps I will have the courage to stop the murder of innocent trees by requesting all of my statements online, and just print what I need.

There are opt-out services that can get rid of junk mail.

Perhaps only then will I live in a utopian world where trees will get to live their lives, and people will lie in the shade under them contemplating the clouds. There will be no stacks of statements, no oceans of invoices. The only mail that comes will be greeting cards, and magazines.

And, of course, catalogs for the Luddite.