Joy, it was passable. Maybe she wasn’t totally hopeless in the kitchen. Cheered by the thought, she made a plan to test out one of the recipes in those books she’d found.
Given the prospect of finding more boxes full of underthings—whether dirty or clean—she eyed the room with a certain amount of trepidation. Still, the job had to be done, so armed with a box cutter and a can-do attitude, she took stock. Boxes of every shape and size, from plastic storage bins to shoe boxes were stacked haphazardly to form the walls and partitions of a complicated maze.
Or, were they? Adriel flipped back through the photographic memory—one of the perks she had retained from being an angel. Able to picture the room exactly as it had been before she moved anything, she realized there might have been a pattern. Clearly Craig had not used box size as a criteria for choosing what went where, since larger boxes sometimes sat on a group of smaller ones. It looked, instead, as though he might have sorted them by weight or importance.
She couldn’t hold back a sigh. His organizational method had zero bearing on how she should proceed, even if trying to figure it out was an interesting puzzle. It was time to stop dithering around and get to work.
Picking a stack at random, she selected the smallest box on top of the pile closest to the bedroom door, and carried it to the table to open. Winston leapt from his perch on the refrigerator to rub his cheek against the cardboard corner.
“You like this one?” Adriel asked the cat, who only purred in response. She applied blade to tape. “Well, of course you do.” The box contained an assortment of kitty toys. Fast as lightning, the cat nipped out a feather-covered ball with an agile paw. A quick flick sent the ball flying across the room—the bell inside jingling madly as a blur of black fur engaged in a wild game of ball hockey snaking through the maze of boxes until he passed out of Adriel’s line of sight.
A muted thump was the only warning she heard before a short stack of boxes tumbled behind the streaking cat. This must have been the reason for boxing up his toys. She set Winston’s things aside and grabbed the first of three identical boot boxes left in his wake. Each was filled with balls of crumpled newsprint protecting a single item cocooned in bubble wrap and packing tape. Layers and layers of packing tape which, when carefully cut away revealed…three perfectly ordinary acorns—one in each box.
Craig’s reason for collecting them defied comprehension. Though Adriel had to admit, there was a certain amount of fancy in the idea of preserving memories with such small specimens of nature. Fancy brought with it a sense of sadness over the way time or disease had eventually robbed Craig of even these small reminders. She sent out a prayer for him to find peace.
Then she sent out one for herself to find patience. Respectful though she might want to be, opening box after box full of inane items was going to test the boundaries of her patience and her sense of humor. The acorns did not go out with the trash, she lined them up on one of the shelves to remind herself within absurdity, sometimes something profound existed.
The rest of the boxes Winston had knocked down were heavy ones filled with newspapers dating from the past few years. She scanned a couple before realizing it would be a week before she finished reading those, and put them down to move on to start the next stack.
Less interesting, this section held boxes full of empty grocery bags, deli containers with no lids, lids with no containers—none of them matching—and other similar items which Adriel duly sorted. Anything recyclable—according to the list held to the refrigerator with a magnet—she set aside for that purpose. What few usable items she found were mostly clothing. Some would go to Hamlin for distribution to the homeless; the rest Craig might still be able to wear. Books, dishes, and personal items she set aside for Pam. Useless items, those being the bulk of what she found, went into the portable dumpster out front. The best find so far was a box of brightly colored pillows. Tossed onto the sofa, they cheered the room considerably.
An hour or so later, Adriel lifted the hair off her neck with a grimy hand. One more box to go. Clearing this stack meant no more dodging sideways to get from the sofa into the bedroom. A small victory.
A puff of dust swirled into the air at her sigh when, even after tugging with every ounce of her strength, the last box proved too heavy to lift. She squatted to slice at the tape holding it closed. More dust flew as she opened the flaps to find it stuffed to the brim with spiral bound notebooks, each with a date written on the front. It felt like an invasion of privacy at first, but since it was her job to sort through these items, she went ahead and flipped open the red cover of the one on top. Carefully inscribed lines formed a grid on each page where Craig had kept a chronicle of weather conditions at morning, noon, and night for an entire year.
What was she supposed to do with this type of thing? Laying the first book aside, she leafed through the next: a set of meticulous records detailing everything from his daily food intake to how many hours of sleep he had
