This week’s partial culling of the personal archive is no small challenge. What to keep? Why?

My life’s paper trail was longer than I’d imagined.

It had sat, a perpetual fire hazard I’m sure, in seven or eight boxes in our roof for the past four years during each of which it grew incrementally. Before that it had been in the cellar of our last house for 15 years and for a few more in storage while we lived overseas.

It was time for “the purge”.