My mom saved packaging. The UPCs from her endless packs of Salem cigarettes, the woven red cages that once held oranges. The coleslaw and potato salad containers that stacked up until we couldn’t see each other anymore. Until there was no way to get around it. Until any move would topple the fragile house she’d built.

She hoarded information. Magazine articles, recipe cards, newspaper clippings, and books upon books upon books. She took notes on the news, on radio shows, on conversations she had. Last Tuesday, I found a slip of paper where she’d documented each of our reactions to the movie “The King’s Speech.” On Christmas Eve 2008, my dad didn’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ to her until the evening, when he arrived home from work. Did she keep track of all of our sins, our transgressions, our rude comments? Where did she file rolled eyes? We were rats impatient in the maze built of stacks of knowledge, and there was never a way out.

The day I got kicked out of the house, I’d held high a stack of papers in the bathroom, threatening to throw them on the ground.

“Put those down,” mom demanded. My dad stood, silent, behind her.

I had a flair for the dramatic back then. I bargained. “Admit this stuff is more important to you than we are.”

“Put it down,” she said again.

To me, that was her admitting it.

I threw down the handfuls of carefully tracked numbers, the thoughtfully saved news clippings all over the bathroom tile.

“Get out of my house,” she said. Dad didn’t argue. Neither did I.

I nosed my way out of the maze, rat eyes blinking in the sun.

It’s been nearly four years since she died, and I’m still finding notes about a ruby inset necklace that would make a nice 21^st birthday present for me. A script of ‘how are you?’ and ‘what have the kids been up to?’ that she wrote out in preparation of corresponding with an old high school friend. She felt she needed a script.

If I puzzle-fit her notes, can I cobble together what I wished our mother-daughter talks could have been? Will her encrypted messages feel like a kiss on my forehead?

I’m unbuilding her, page by page, giving away everything it took her a lifetime to save.