It was probably too soon, but I made an attempt anyway. It has been two weeks since Mom died and yesterday I decided to take a cursory look at the mounds of paperwork she had amassed from being a community volunteer, preservationist, and historian for over fifty years. These papers are her story, her history, her work that lives on. I need to organize them.
Itâs going to be a bit of a job, if you will entertain my understatement. Mom did not have a computer, so nothing has been scanned into computer files or stored in a Cloud. Instead, I am confronting boxes of original documents and her meticulous notes, in which she detailed where a particular artifact was discovered (often accompanied with a photograph) before it was placed in the Taoist Temple museum. Her notebooks also include lists of China Alley tours, including dates, the names of tourists, where they were from, and why they were interested in visiting the Alley. Other boxes bulge with thorough notebooks on forty years