Trails

I'm cleaning off Sandy's desktop computer, the one she had in the TV room. It was old and painfully slow long before she died. She planned to replace it, but money was tight. She increasingly used her laptop for web browsing, answering email, and creating documents, but the desktop computer remained her vidding machine.

Laura took this picture back in 2001. The basic setup remained
the same, but Sandy moved into the vidding corner more
completely, with shelves on the wall and in the windowsill,
and with more electronics surrounding her. The green chair,
given to me by a friend who was leaving town, has long
since lost its headrest and part of one of the arms, and was
the victim of many a kitten fight. But Sandy still sat in it
just about every evening as we watched TV and she read
email, blogs, and her LiveJournal feed. The corner of the
sofa that's in the picture was my nest, with Belly tucked
between me and the armrest. It was a comforting routine.

More than a year after she died, I'm still tentative about wading into her files. I consider my computers to be incredibly private and fragile spaces, and I'm nervous when anyone even checks their email on them. Sandy was much less fussy about hers. If her computer was the one handy when I wanted to look something up online, I always asked first. And she always reiterated that I could use them any time. Somehow, she didn't recognize that my unease using her computers was related to my concern about anyone using mine. I freaked out whenever I realized she'd popped into my office and started using my laptop. Of course, she never hurt anything, and she did eventually remember to announce that she was about to use one of my systems, if not to actually ask.

So I've been bracing myself, taking a deep breath, and starting to browse. I was delighted to find dozens, maybe hundreds, of photos that she'd downloaded from our camera but never shared with me. That's pretty exciting. Each time I've started to think I'm running out of new photos of Sandy, more appear.

Today, I delved a little deeper, deciding what I needed to copy off the machine, and realized just how much you can learn from a computer's file manager. There's a trail of interests, projects, travel (packing lists galore), problem-solving downloads. I keep running across file names that make me stop and remember where we were or what she was doing on the day the file was created or downloaded; I don't even need to open them to grow weepy and to be grateful for more solid evidence that she was here, she took up space, and she had a full, rewarding, and sometimes frustrating life.