I was looking for something in my wallet. I don’t keep a lot in my wallet, but I have a small zippered pocket with a few important things in it. Things I don’t have to access often, but I know where they are when I need them.

I hadn’t opened the zipper for a while.

When I did, I found a sandwich order. It was written on a piece of brown paper sack. Several years ago, my husband had written the order on a small piece of paper he tore from a bag of screws he’d bought at the hardware store to build a dog pen. I accessed the piece of paper so often, unfolding and refolding it, that is was now soft. I’d made a few changes as his order shifted through the years.

I hadn’t used the sandwich order cheat sheet for many months. And I won’t need it again. There will be no more picking up a sandwich on a hot day when he’s working outside and needs a boost of energy. There will be no more “let’s just pick up a couple sandwiches” because we don’t want to cook days. There will be no more “we” days at all, with or without familiar sandwich orders. There will be no more shared familiar..

Sometimes we run across things that used to be a part of our routine lives that become never-agains.

Sometimes, important pieces become discarded scraps.

We can’t keep zipping everything into the nooks and crannies of our lives. Sometimes we need to sort.