Paper Trail

Eight years
of trainings and task forces,
creating curricula,
selling ideas
and myself
now boils down
to this -

shelves of 3-ring binders,
final reports,
quality improvement plans
and meeting minutes.
Suddenly it's all just history.

It feels both grinchly and sad to take it with me.
I know it will not benefit others if I keep it
and know as surely that it will be thrown away
if I leave it behind.
The next person will have her own vision.
Things in her office will need her handwriting on them.
I sort through all the drawers
and understand that "the work" as we all label it,
the passion we all share,
the movement to which we all belong,
doesn't live in these folders and files.
They are dead
and I am gone.

I relegate the boxes to a table and file cabinet
in my basement
and pray that it all meant something more than this.
Please let it be more, with a now
and a future.
Let it be the setting sun on the Atlantic
that plays with the waves until its last beams can't reach
and then still is only moving on to brighten other places.
Let it be something that lasts,
a few of the cobblestones
laid down on the road
that leads women out of darkness and danger
and into the light.