Shreds of Evidence

I love this time of year.  It’s when I get to go through the file cabinets and shred old tax forms and other documents that are beyond their need-to-keep time. I like getting rid of this stuff and the grinding noise of the shredder makes my heart rejoice. At the height of winter about a month ago, new phone books were delivered, sealed in plastic bags and dropped next to the mailboxes along our road. Our neighbors across the street drive up and get their mail when they come home from work and they never bothered to get out of their car and retrieve their directory.  I assume it was either because they forgot or just didn’t care enough to deal with the iciness of the road — and let’s be honest — with so much information online, telephone books just aren’t used very much anymore. We’ve had an unusually snowy winter this year. Several times the plow has come through and created a berm that rendered it next to impossible for delivery people so my husband decided to be helpful and used our snow blower to clear the huge pile of snow from the area around the mailbox and newspaper delivery tube. The neighbor’s telephone book was still out there, someplace underneath and totally covered by the mountain of snow that the plow had created. I don’t think that paper shredding is one of a snow blower’s normal functions but it leapt at the opportunity. I had no idea how much paper could be contained in just one phone book, until I saw it shredded and thrown on the neighbor’s snowy lawn.