After we moved from South Dakota to Washington, my sister moved from Montana to Oregon. My sister had been living in the cabin that was our family’s summer home for many years. As I helped her move out of the cabin, we went through boxes of stored items that had been left unsorted after our parents died. I think we knew it before, but the process was another reminder that we come from a long line of people who loved paper. We still have boxes and boxes of the journals of our mother’s grandfather. He was a pioneer court reporter in Montana Territory before statehood and served in the territorial capital. He also was a personal friend of Brother Van, a Methodist circuit riding preacher who left a big mark on the state. As a result his journals have historical value and we are making arrangements for them to become part of official historical archives. The historians, however, don’t want the paper journals. They want digital documents. Scanning the journals is a significant task and a problem that we have not yet solved.

It wasn’t just grandpa Roy who kept journals and loved writing on paper. Sorting through some of our parents’ belongings might make someone think that we owned stock in stationary stores or had some kind of notebook fetish. After helping my sister with her recent move, I came home with a stack of half page size yellow legal pads. These have 5” x 7” sheets. I use those pads and have a notebook with space to carry a couple of them and a pen that I always carry in my backpack. But this stack is more than I will be able to use in the rest of my lifetime. And I use quite a few. For example, right now to the right of my computer keyboard there are three, each with notes on a different project. It seems that I not only inherited our mother’s love of notepads, but I also have inherited the paper to support the habit.

Our father’s preferred paper size was smaller. He was a lover of pocket notebooks. He gave away pocket notebooks as advertisements for his farm machinery business, and always had one in his pocket to record notes on deals he was working, reminders of chores he wanted to complete, and lists of tasks. He put one of the notebooks into the glove compartment of every vehicle we owned and he expected to have every oil change and repair job recorded in those notebooks. He was a licensed pilot and an authorized airframe and engine mechanic. He was used to the detailed maintenance logbooks required for aircraft. He expected similar records for his vehicles and he passed on that tradition to his children. One of the changes that I have made in retirement is that I have removed the pocket notebooks from our vehicles that I used to record mileage. For my professional career, I recorded every trip in our vehicles including mileage, destination, and purpose of the trip. For years we kept complete mileage records as we claimed a tax deduction for professional travel. I decided that the combination of the fact that we are no longer able to deduct mileage and the fact that we are retired has meant that I don’t need to keep those records.

Maintenance records on our vehicles are kept in the computers of the shops that perform the maintenance. I no longer need a notebook in the vehicle to check when the last oil change or brake job was performed. But I have a supply of pocket notebooks.

And despite having sorted through the stacks of pens and pencils that we accumulated from 25 years of living in the same house, there still are plenty of extra pens and pencils in our home. We haven’t bought paper for our computer printer since we moved and I think we probably moved four or five years’ supply. The same is true of envelopes. It is possible that we will not need to purchase regular letter-size envelopes for the rest of our lives. To be fair, however, we inherited boxes of envelopes from both Susan’s parents and from mine.

There is no shortage of any office supplies in our house. We have extra scotch tape and multiple dispensers, extra staples and staplers though we don’t use very many staples, and enough paper clips for any purpose we can imagine.

I like having supplies on hand. It is nice to be able to invite guests for a meal and not have to make an extra trip to the grocery store. When the weather turns cold and the streets become slippery, we won’t go hungry. We keep staples on hand and have a well-stocked freezer. If we had to live off of our on-hand supplies, we’d make it for weeks, though we might get a bit tired of chicken and rice for most of our meals.

I suspect that we could make it for the rest of our lives without purchasing additional office supplies. We might run out of a particular size of paper or envelope, but there would be plenty of other sizes on hand.

My Great Uncle Ted prided himself on having whatever was needed on hand. He kept bits and pieces and parts in containers all over his house and garage and in several sheds in the back yard. He didn’t like to throw out anything that he might one day use. And he was a master at making parts for various objects. He was a skilled sheet metal worker and could fashion a lot of different items from the metal of a 3 pound coffee can. He’d cut open the seam, flatten the metal and reshape it to make whatever he wanted. He kept nuts and bolts and wire screws and rubber bands and bits of string and rope in coffee cans. Going through his house you might come to the conclusion that he never threw away any of the coffee cans he’d purchased. And he drank coffee every day.

I’m trying to be responsible and not increase the supply of notebooks and paper in our home. I avoid stationary and office supply stores as much as possible. Perhaps I could add a bit of moderation to the inherited tendencies before handing them onto our grandchildren.