My sister was an extremely organized individual. I’m not saying that everything in her life was on point or that she was on top of every detail. She could lose things. She could forget stuff. But if it was lost or put away somewhere she could not remember, you can bet at least it was labeled or arranged in some orderly fashion.

I remember, from when we were kids, her books. The headboard of her bed was basically a cubby of divided shelves the perfect size for keeping books handy for reading by lamp before bedtime. It could have been used for other things. If it was mine, I would have had model cars on display and maybe that goofy bird that rocked back and forth over a glass of water until it finally took a drink. I could watch that thing for hours.

But Marian’s thing was books. Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew. Huck Finn. Treasure Island. All of them lined up neatly on her bookshelf above her pillows. Sectioned together in groups. Definitely in alphabetical order. More organized than the Dewey Decimal System.

I hadn’t thought about this much until I went to see my brother-in-law the other day. When Marian passed away, he, much like I did, busied himself with going through her things and cleaning up. Some of it was necessary. She had an office in the house and there were bills to pay and accounts to settle.

Other things could wait.

Tucked away in a closet, there were several boxes that he skipped over for a while. He has been waiting for me to come and go through them with him. And now that I have the time, I texted him and asked about coming up to take a look at those boxes.

“How about I come up tomorrow morning around 10am?”

“That’ll work,” he says. “I’ll bring the boxes up from the basement.”

When I got there, the boxes were stacked on the floor against the wall in the dining room.

My very first thought was, “Wow, those are neat boxes.”

When I need boxes for storing my stuff, I grab whatever I can find in the dumpster out back of the dollar store. Beat up boxes. Stained boxes. Boxes that have been cut with, get this, a box cutter. Missing lids or flaps. Torn handles. I just really don’t care. My attic is full of these boxes.

Marian’s boxes are from the Home Depot, and from inside the store not the dumpster out back. They are perfect 20X20” cubes that stack well and that have no stains or bends and no cuts. They are taped shut and in her handwritten notations they are labeled. Personal. Travel Photos. Chappell Photos. School-1970s.

Paul and I sat at the dining room table and unpacked Marian’s life. The one box marked “Chappell” and “1970s” he handed off to me.

“I figure that’s going to be stuff you may want to keep.”

Most of what these boxes contain are photographs. School ones. Wedding ones. Vacation ones. Christmas ones. Most of them in my box were taken with a Kodak Instamatic. All of them were developed by some drop-off print service or mail-in service that return the negatives with your poorly taken pictures. 12 or 24 on a roll. Some so dark you can’t make anything out. Some you look at and pause, collect your breath, and try to relive a moment you haven’t thought about in 50 years.

Look, I love digital photography, but I suspect somehow that rummaging back through old photos a long time from now won’t be the same as going through these boxes. I’m holding picture albums that Marian put together. I’m flipping through a stack of photos, touching each one, some of which she wrote notes on the back. It’s like pulling up little pieces of her life from an archaeological dig.

After she got married and divorced in her early twenties, she traveled a lot, and she took photography classes and practiced taking pictures a lot. Pictures of the American landscape. Single flower heads floating above the meadow with the sun setting in the background.

The next box I open has nothing but Kodak slides in it. One carousel and roughly 1.5 gazillion slides. There’s a viewer but no cord with a plug. I hold a few up to the light over the table. Mountains. Cathedrals. Castles. European looking places. Cliffs above oceans. Good grief, she loved to travel.

Apparently, she kept every travel brochure and hotel receipt from every place she’d ever been across the globe. If you ever need a map and a tour guide to anyplace from Nova Scotia to Germany to New Zealand, I’ve got one you can borrow. It’s in the box.

Paul says, “Would you look at this!” He holds up a picture of a time when faces were young, and hair was long and thick.

I hold up one. “Where was this?”

“Oh, that was the Castles and Grapes tour we took.”

It wasn’t all just pictures. There’s a high school scrapbook. A few cards and letters. There’s one from her good friend Ginger that looks like one of those hostage letters on TV. A cut-out picture of the skyline of Atlanta with cut-out magazine words glued over it. “Welcome back to Atlanta” it says.

You cannot put the entirety of a person’s life inside a box. I know that. But it gets me at some gut level that of all the things that she held on to over so many years, it does come down to the contents of a handful of boxes. Of all the thousands of pictures, only a few made it to a frame up on a shelf somewhere. There are a lot of these pictures, I’m sure, that she had forgotten, and she kept them so she could go through them and remember.

The one thing she feared as she got older was that she might end up with Alzheimer’s like Mama. She didn’t want to forget. She didn’t want to lose all those memories. She didn’t want to fade away. You might say Mercy spared her of that.

No one wants to forget where they’ve been in this life. So, you keep this stuff. The crazy stuff in high school and the friends and the cramped little apartments and the pitiful Christmas trees and sunsets on the beach and the monopoly game on the living room floor and the first car, and the first boyfriend. All of it made her who she was.

You don’t throw that away.

So, she filled a few boxes. Taped them shut. Wrote on them and put them in the back of a closet for later.

I brought one box home with me. Things for me to go through at my own pace when I have time. And today I have the time. Here I sit remembering her. Remembering for her and with her.

“Holy Cow! Would you look at that!”

I get my magnifying glass and hover it over the picture. Dang eyesight.

“Gheez, Louise,” I say. “Would you look at that long hair and bellbottom jeans.”

I was such a dork.