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Oy. Today, after bagging food at the food bank, I went up to the office to do some cleaning. You would not believe the mess. I'm a tidy person. I may let the dust bunnies build up, but my stuff is where it's supposed to be. When I use something, I put it back where I got it. When I get something new I find a place for it. I'll usually have a couple of piles of papers, things I have to "get to" and "go through," but nothing too bad. I'm a filer, not a piler. Fr. W is a piler. The people's warden is a piler. The last twenty years of rectors and wardens have been pilers. In a small parish, in which there are only a few people doing all the work, little things get left undone. Little things like clearing out a waist-high pile of old Sunday bulletins and minutes from long-past meetings and letters announcing events coming up in May...1997. I kid you not. In addition, the office is where the thurible is stored and lit. A thurible (for my non-high-church readers) is also called a censer, the incense pot on the end of chains, used in worship. What this means is copious clouds of incense smoke...in the office. Everything is covered with a thin film of clinging dust, the product of normal dust mixed with the resin of incense smoke. So not only were there heaps of paper, those heaps were coated in a fine grey grime. Yum. So we started pulling down the piles, opening boxes to peer into the past and chucking out vast quantities of paper. And there's the rub...there's no recycling pick-up at St. Bart's. There's no trash pick-up, actually. We lug our garbage to the Regent Park bins. So now the boxes of paper that used to be clogging the office are now piled on the landing just outside the door. I'm hoping to take them to the recycling centre tomorrow. Was that as boring to read as it was to write? |
