FlashNano2023 Disapearance

 The Missing Blue Folder

The blue folder wasn't in the file cabinet where I'd left it. It was the only blue folder to make sure it stood out from the 1 red (bills) 5 green (letters) 2 black (contracts) 4 purple (documents), 3 white (certificates), and 2 yellow (guarantees) 7 gray (taxes) and 1 brown (insurance) folders. All the folders had flaps and elastics so things wouldn't fall out.

Years ago, before my second marriage to Bill, I'd worked out the color coding. 

The blue one was special because it contained all our important papers in one folder: birth certificates, passports, Bill's divorce decree, my late husband's death certificate, a list of important contacts, bank account numbers, doctors, medicines. If something happened to Bill and me at the same time, I'd told my daughter and his son where to look ... one stop shopping so to speak to settle stuff.

But it was gone. I searched the room that I used as a office. I'm a writer and work at home. Nothing.

All the documents were scanned but so often when we needed to do something official people wanted originals which was another reason I'd made the blue folder.

Although I had a deadline, I spent most of the day trying to find the folder. 

Bill came home at his usual time. Most nights I'd have a cooked meal, not that he expected it. It was just if I sat too long at the computer, I'd get stiff and getting up to cook this or that was movement.

Bill would cook too, sometimes. Or we would go out or get take- aways. It worked.

We have a no pussyfooting rule. When something is wrong we tell the other and it usually starts with "Do you know what your stupid spouse did?"

I told him.

He laughed. "I thought it was redundant so I emptied everything into other folders."

Very seldom am I annoyed at my husband. We usually laugh at each other's idiosyncrasies. The one thing he does, that I don't laugh at, is when I arrange things he rearranges them.

This was more than annoyance. Anger at an unasked-for change to a system that had worked for decades, ran through me almost to the point I could picture myself recreating the blue folder and adding his death certificate along with the newspaper stories on how a wife killed her husband.

I didn't kill him. I bought a new blue folder and went through all the other folders until the blue folder was like it was before my husband's interference with a working system. 

I now hide the blue folder under the mattress in the guest bedroom. Our kids know where to find it. Bill does not.