Yesterday I moved from one apartment in Boston to another - a disgusting activity, given the temperature outdoors.

During the process, my moving-helpers and I decided to pull the empty drawers out of my dresser before carrying it down the stairs to the street.

This is when we found a handful of yellowed sheets of paper, wedged up in the interior crevices of my dresser.

These sheets of paper were two separate New York Times articles, one from Sunday November 20, 1988, titled The Aging Grace of Roquefort, by Florence Fabricant

…and one from Wednesday, July 24, 1996, titled Meadow-Sweet Ricotta of Childhood Memory is Back, by Jack Bishop

Needless to say, my excitement had no bounds.

I inherited this ugly dresser from my aunt and uncle, in 2008. It had been sitting in an unused room in their apartment for what I imagine to be a couple of years? Who had cut out these articles and kept them in this dresser’s drawers? Granted, '88 and '96 were not THAT long ago, but I was still filled with a Nancy Drew-like sense of discovery.

Whoever it was, they took pen to paper, and marked up the ricotta article, underlining and commenting here and there - writing “wow” next to the sentence “technically, ricotta is not even a cheese.”

I’m going to keep these two crinkly, yellowed articles in my dresser for as long as they last, and perhaps I’ll cut out my own, 21st century cheese articles, for the next dresser-owner to find.

See photos below...