We don't get a lot of things to really care about.

[pig]

I couldn't sleep that night, so I rose quietly and tiptoed to the study past my mother dreaming her dreams and my father dreaming his. I sat in the creaking wooden chair that was pulled up to the roll-top desk and settled my tailbone right in the middle. There was nothing else to do, so I opened the bottom right drawer and began.

It was all maps, absolutely stuffed full of maps, most of them new even though they weren't. I felt a jarring sensation when I saw several of them, the 2010 one of Flagstaff, the one of Boulder a year or two newer, even one of Paris from the same year I spent a semester abroad there. I was touched to see my special places here alongside all of his, that he'd wanted to understand them too. 

The drawer was impossibly deep, swallowing my arm almost to my shoulder like I was a farmer midwifing a calf, one bag filled with maps to throw away and a small pile next to it of ones to keep. 

What is the strongest force in the universe? he used to say when I was eight, twelve, seventeen, then answer himself before I could crawl out of the bottom of my yawn. Entropy! Everything always breaks down! We have to fight it!

When he said this, it was usually a cue that we were supposed to join him in cleaning the house. Even now, when I watch him on Wednesdays and Sundays, the most common things he does are pushing a broom around the floor or drawing an old hand towel mechanically across a countertop, over and over. I look at the piles of junk in my home and think about how even now, he's fighting it, the thing that has so easily overtaken me.

Were the maps a way to order, understand, and then combat entropy, or were they a symptom of it? So many of them never even cracked open, mailed to him by people with jobs in city halls and tourist centers. I read so many of their typed, attached notes, eager for a feature from a beloved local columnist. Dad's twin emotions of exhaustion and guilt with their requests showed in how they'd been shoved into this neglected corner of an inscrutable filing system, but not thrown away. I read about bluebonnet tours and new restaurant openings from years past, First Fridays and car shows, Historic Route Whatever drives. 

Mom joined me when the sky had just begun to lighten. She didn't say anything, just pulled up a chair and opened the next drawer. There was the typewritten deed to the house, from 1992, for just under $90,000. An envelope with the key to the Renault, the faithless French car, the subject of so many disastrous stories. The actual hospital notes from our births- did the nursing staff just give copies of these to the parents in the eighties, or did Dad ask for them? 

I don't know, and Mom doesn't remember, and both of us are too tired to care, yawning as we trade stacks of yellowed file folders whose labels have nothing to do with their contents. One is labeled Ideas but only has medical receipts stuck in it. Another says The Girls but all I find is a rubber-banded ziplock with mismatched keys in it. It could be an interesting mystery, except we only have about forty-eight more hours to clean out the entire house so it isn't. It hits the discard pile with a hollow thump.

We work, mostly in silence. Old bills go into the shredding pile. Old notes from medical providers about blood pressure, cholesterol levels. It's the detritus of a life, of our lives. Occasionally Mom leans back and laughs while holding something at arm's length to read, or I wave some inscrutable piece of paper and ask for the story. Finally the morning is mostly gone and the desk is empty, the contents sorted into orderly piles on the floor- trash, recycle, shred, keep. Dad has slept right through this dismantling. 

Mom stands and closes the roll top, locks it. Miraculous that for all these years- the desk has to be almost a century old- the key has never been lost. We go to let Dad out of the bedroom. More mornings than not these days we find him standing in the room, hands at his sides, unsure how to use the doorknob to let himself out.

The key is here, against all reason. The desk is empty, for the first time in my life or hers. We may have won this battle, but we both know that entropy- inevitable, irrepressible- has won the war. 

He will walk by his desk today without recognizing it, the site of so much dreaming, the Annie Dillard quote he printed off taped to the side, about our galaxy is a flung thing, loose in the night, our solar system one of many campfires. What shall we sing? he would always finish the quote with a flourish.

This beloved quote. We would write it on the cover of the bulletin for his funeral. It's been stuck to the desk forever. I love that he loved it enough to print it off, carefully cut around it, tape it up where he and we would see it every day. 

I pull at the tape until it comes off. I put it in the pile of things coming home with me to Oregon, along with high school photography projects, old journals, all the things you can't bring yourself to let go of yet. 

It's so strange that life goes on, that someone else lives in your childhood home, that the next time you come to your hometown you have to find an Airbnb because none of your people live there anymore. My memories of home feel like one endless, hot summer- the hum of cicadas rising and falling, my parent's voices calling from another room, school and summer camp and canoe trips and church and college and lying on the floor to write, dog claws clicking, the way the screen door sounds when it slams closed, the way the house itself smells like dust and stucco and our skin. Then it's gone. Did I remember it right? Did it happen at all? 

When I opened the box three years later in the attic, the Annie Dillard quote wasn't there. I looked and I looked, tripping over piles of junk, sweat beading around the band of my headlamp. But I couldn't find it anywhere, a flung thing, loose in the night, one more piece of the past that only exists in memory.