In an effort to clean out my house of the never ending amount of clutter I have managed to collect in my 36+ years on this planet, I have been scanning anything I do not need to save a paper copy of. Certain things, your car title, birth certificate, your children’s crafts, need to be saved. Other things, like the one year of utility bills, bank statements, etc. that you need for taxes or proof of purchase for warranties, can all be scanned into electronic format and easily purged with a stroke of the delete key at the end of the year. Earlier this year I had a computer hiccup which crashed Windows Vista. My scanning project got put on hold. It is amazing how much stuff I save! Windows 7 now installed and updated scanner software drivers downloaded, the project is back on track. Each morning of this new year I am trying to spend one hour tackling the mountain of paper that I have managed to save.
Besides the monthly utility bills and receipts, I have collected a small library of research on my dream. Magazine articles, publications, lists of books which I would like to read, something someone said to me which might be relevant someday – all squirreled away in a file for future reference. Reviving a farm which has been retired for forty years is no small project. My grandparents, who had successfully run this farm, have now passed. My father and his brothers who worked on the farm into their late teens have all moved on to other pursuits in life. Local farmers are emptying their haylofts, selling their milking herds and retiring or looking outside the farm for employment. Intimate resources are becoming few and far between. Books, magazines and the internet have become invaluable learning tools for me as I take this journey.
This past summer I was given an incredible gift of research. My mother-in-law’s good friend moved from her longtime home and cleaned out years of publications which she had saved. I received the seven taped, brown paper, grocery bags with trepidation. I placed those bags into the van and started to close the van door when my husband told me to hold on, I turned to see two old vegetable crates full of more taped bags and some loose magazines. At the time, I accepted the ‘gift’ with a forced smile thinking that I would be piling yet more paper into my already overstuffed bookshelves, adding more stuff that I could only hope to get to someday. There are few occasions when it is nice to be proven wrong; however this was one of them. The scissors trembled as I cut into the first bag – Organic Gardening – the WHOLE BAG. Giddy I skimmed through the top few issues saved from 1993. A wealth of information. DH walked in and grimaced, ‘Oh, boy. I have lost you for the next several hours.’ I removed two issues and placed them in my bag to take to work and read during slow times. The next bag – Mother Earth News – this time DH was smiling, I can’t say happy exactly, but at least smiling. Another bag had a selection of saved information from another gardening magazine and saved pamphlets from Better Homes and Gardens. Six months later, I have gotten through all seven bags, but am still working on the vegetable crates. Maybe when I am done I can have an entire electronic library on how to choose, care for, harvest, preserve, sell or simply enjoy everything that can possibly be produced from the family farm.
If I were to keep all of that paper, I would need several lateral filing cabinets. All this research has only reserved the first few hundred megabytes on my hard disk. I may eventually hit a gigabyte, but for now I have plenty of room. I back up the computer every month onto a portable hard drive and store that in the safe. My shelves remain crammed with books on farming, raising trees, making cheese and various other farm related subjects. And there are those magazines which contain far too much useful information to tear out each and every article, but that’s why some ingenious individual created the bookshelf in the first place.
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