When I was in high school, my parents bought a small desk for me. It was, I’m pretty sure, an inexpensive piece. It was metal, had a single file drawer, a pencil drawer, and another drawer. I took that desk to college with me after my freshman year and kept it with me through graduate school and a couple of moves after we graduated. I don’t remember what happened to that desk, but at some point we decided that we didn’t need it any longer and found a new home for it. After we moved to South Dakota, my sister was going through a move and she had an oak library table that had belonged to our mother. I picked up that table on a visit and have used it as my desk ever since. It is very sold and has only own drawer. I’ve got that drawer stuffed so full that it hardly opens. There are business cards, pairs of shoelaces, paper clips, rulers, highlighters, pens, keychains, and a couple of pocket knives. There are scissors and rulers and bandaids and tweezers. There are probably a lot more things in that drawer that I’ve forgotten that I own. I’m not too good with drawers. I tend to stuff them full of things when I am trying to clean. This table works as a desk for me precisely because it doesn’t have a bunch of drawers to stuff full of more junk.

However, the top of my table is strewn with papers of all kinds. When I get on a roll and clean it off, I discover a few books that can be put back on the shelves, a few receipts and papers that need to be filed, a couple of letters that I need to answer, and a whole lot of paper that needs to be recycled. I’m pretty sure that there are at least four or five letters on my desk from worthy charities whose objectives align with my values, but to which I have not donated, and probably will not donate at this time. I’m not sure why I keep such things, except that sometimes I think I might decided to make a gift. The causes that we support are mostly different ones. We’re careful about planning our gifts to the church and other causes that are most important to us. But we also make a few small gifts to other causes from time to time. My mother was a generous donor to a variety of causes and she lived with us in Rapid City at the end of her life. Somehow a few of those causes followed our move away from Rapid City and send appeals to her name at our new address, even though we moved a second time after we retired. Some of our friends have lost our address, but the fundraisers seem to have no trouble following us from house to house even though my mother has been gone for a dozen years now.

On top of my desk is an oak shelf that I built to hold my computer monitor. The shelf had that single purpose. It was designed to just be a place to raise a computer monitor to eye level. That’s all. But there is a pitch pipe on that shelf because I don’t know where else one might put a pitch pipe and I seem to want to have one from time to time. Then there is a truly impressive pile of address labels. I use a few labels from time to time, but nowhere near as many as arrive in the mail. It seems that sending address labels is a favorite tactic of fund-raisers. I’ve got address labels from the Arbor Day Foundation, the National Parks Conservation Association, Seattle Children’s Hospital, the National Wildlife Federation, the ASPCA, Ducks Unlimited, St. Jude Hospital and a whole bunch of other charities. Each of these causes is convinced that their mission is worthy and that I should be delighted to make a donation. And I have to admit that there are a lot of causes that are doing a lot of good in the world. In terms of total dollars, we have donated far more to the church than any other cause over the span of our lives. And I don’t have any address labels from the church, nor do I want the church to be in the business of sending out address labels, or tote bags, or coffee mugs, or pens, or flashlights, or any of the other “gifts” that come from charitable organizations.

The truth is that I am completely capable of writing my return address on an envelope in a legible manner. I didn’t need to spend a few minutes searching through all of my return address labels to find one with a bee on it to put on the envelope sending my apiary registration form to the Washington State Agriculture Department. I’m pretty sure that no one noticed the artistry of my effort.

One thing about moving is that it gave me an excuse to get rid of address labels that had old addresses printed on them. It didn’t take long living at our new address label to have the labels coming to this address at a rate much higher than I consume the labels. I’m not sure what there is about a sheet of stickers that gets me to keep them around other than the simple fact that most of the rest of the contents of the appeal letter can go into the recycling bin and the stickers, with their coated paper backing, cannot be recycled and have to go into the trash. We try very hard not to contribute too much to the landfill, but there are some things that simply cannot be composted or recycled. I don’t know what the half life of a sheet of return address labels printed on sticker paper is, but I suspect it is fairly long.

So my desk is far from orderly. I know I need to clean it. It would only take a little while to sort out everything on it, I’m sure. On the other hand, I probably would just make a new pile of address labels and not throw any of them out. You never know when I might want one with an apple, or a cat, or an ice cream cone. I might need butterflies or rabbits or chicks for Easter greetings. I know there were some with turtles on them somewhere.

I probably should apologize to my children and grandchildren who will one day have to go through the things I failed to sort. They will probably find a lot of address labels.