Rip. Rip. Rip.
“It’s time for us to get rid of all these old checks,” mother announced, dropping a huge bag on the floor. My dad had kept all of them, along with countless files and reports about their bank accounts in an old cabinet. Now my mother had decided to clean the cabinet out. So we formed a small circle, my mother, sister, and I, and ripped, tore, or snipped thirteen years’ worth of checks into little pieces.
Rip. Rip.
I finished the small stack I was on and grabbed another from the bag, glancing over the writing before starting to tear. Piles after piles go by like this. Pieces of the checks, in the design my parents have always used, flutter about. Checks that paid for past field trips. Music lessons. The farther down the bag we reach, the older the events recorded on the checks.
Rip.
Finally, we finish. Paper litters the ground. I help to gather up the pieces and drop them in the recycling bag. It seems callous to treat the bits of my past so irreverently. “Perhaps we should have kept a few,” I say. “As momentos.”
Mother nods slightly. “Yes, perhaps we should have.”
But it’s too late. Every check, every last one, has been ripped up, to take their places in the ever-fading past.
