I packed up my desk at work. Guess what I found inside.

I'm packing up my desk. Again.

It's been 25 years this summer since I was hired to work here. And oh, how many desks there have been.

I started in the Mesa bureau and then moved to the main newsroom in downtown Phoenix. Back then it was in a big box of a building with a massive printing press and basketball court in the basement.

The newsroom was on the third floor. I worked on one side for the Phoenix Gazette and then, when the afternoon and the morning newspapers merged, I worked on the other side for The Republic.

We all moved across the street to a brand-new, 10-story building in 1996. My first desk was on the ninth floor, close enough to the windows that I could see what was then the America West Arena.

Since then, I've worked at desks on different sides of three different floors – 7, 8, and 9 – including my favorite, just under the spiral staircase that connects 8 and 9, for a total of 10 moves in all.

The moves came as I got new jobs or new editors, as we formed new teams. Each one brought a new cubicle that looked just like the old one — though I swear they shrink a little each time.

This time, my colleagues and I are getting a new spot, so I'm moving two floors up, back to the ninth floor where I started.

The easiest way to do this, we've learned over many moves, is to take as many things that are on your desk and put them in your desk. For a few other things, I can pack up a cardboard box, or maybe two.

But... my desk is a bit of a mess, honestly. (I'm sure it's a sign of a creative mind.) And my cabinets are full. So for anything that goes in, I'll have to throw something away to make space.

My co-worker Shaun and I go in search of boxes and tape. Shaun pulls a big blue recycling bin over and parks it between our cubicles. And I begin the familiar process: Pick up each thing, sift through each pile of paper, and decide what to cram in, what to toss out.

The top drawer holds a mix of pens, paperclips, four pairs of scissors – no wonder no one can ever find any — and scattered business cards of people I've met over the last two decades. I ponder: Do I still need business cards when I have LinkedIn? It's hard to let go of some old tools of the trade. The cards go in, along with a lint roller, a sparkly purple wand and a dozen vintage Arizona post cards given to me once upon a time by my friend Angela.

I find two staple removers and a stapler, which is always empty, and two boxes of staples (Oh, there they are). In. A small trophy from the only tennis tournament I ever played in, doubles, beginners' division. (We came in second. There were only two teams in our category.) In.

In the next drawer, I find scholarly journals about ESL and reading curriculum. Out. But I gather up the pictures and notes from the kids I once followed from first to third grade as they learned to read. Those stay in.

Letters and cards from readers — a bunch of those will fit in the same drawer. In.

I pull open the third drawer to find a curly blonde synthetic wig that I can't explain. I show it to Shaun and he raises his eyebrows. Out.

But the three Matchbox cars – a police car, a fire engine and an ambulance – from back when I covered the crime beat? In.

On the other side of the desk, there's a stack of newspaper sections, print copies of stories I worked on. I sort through the stack to try to decide which ones I want to save. One about Bikers Against Child Abuse. A few about two gay dads raising a dozen – and then 14 – adopted children. One about a bar mitzvah for a boy who has autism. In.

There are a few more I couldn't toss even if I wanted to. The little girl shot and killed in a grocery store parking lot. A woman diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease at 49. The firefighter who lost his firefighter wife to cancer. Women who lost people they loved to fire.

As I make my way deeper through the drawer, I find more and more things that have gone in over the years.

There are copies of columns, my hair in my picture short and then long and short again. (It's grown long again. I probably need a new picture.) There are stories with double bylines I shared. Seeing each name brings back a memory.

I sift through stacks of reporter's notebooks, distinctively slim to fit in the palm, a spiral on top, and filled with my messy scrawl. Notes from interviews are interspersed with grocery lists and directions to people's houses and offices.

Am I keeping too many? I wonder. I look up at Shaun tossing one after another into the shredder box from a drawer filled with them.

I sift through manila files on nudist summer camps, foster care, and school tax credits. Out.

Educational research papers and social work magazines, out.

There are things still too recent to ignore. The investigative reports on the Yarnell Hill Fire. Foreign policy reports about ISIS. Those stay in.

And there's a row of 58 files, each one for a child killed in the 1990s. They were the subject of a project from 1997, "What Happens When Adults Kill Kids?" about the state's then-lax laws in child-abuse deaths. I don't even have to look at them. I remember their names, still.

The files stay in the drawer, behind the stacks of newspaper sections. I close the file cabinet and collect the last few bits from the desk.

My books. My magazine holders inherited when Laura left. My nameplate — the silly one with a Photoshopped face that Emmanuel made for me — go in a cardboard box on top of the desk.

I peel orange and white moving labels from their backing and stick them on my things. My chair. My phone. My trash can. The fan I keep under the desk.

The framed pictures of my son going back to when he was a baby — I tuck those into my briefcase to take home until the move is done.

I look back over the now-heavier recycling bin and the neat pile of orange-labeled items stacked on my desk, and think about what stays in.

Ask me who I am and I would probably say first that I'm Sawyer's mother. But I've been a reporter longer than I've been that.

A lot goes into that in 25 years — a lot of ideas and sorrows and thrills and memories. A stack of double bylines with people who have gone to other places. A stack of postcards from Angela, who's gone now.

Technically, all these folders and notebooks belong to a company, and all these stories of all these lives belong to the people who lived them.

But whether they end up in the drawer or the recycling bin doesn't really matter. They're all a part of me.

I put a sticker on each box and scribble my name and new cubicle number. Then I pick up my laptop and bag and go, winding my way through the rows of empty cubicles and cardboard boxes until I reach the elevators. I press the down button, ride to the lobby and make my way home, out.

I'll be back in again soon.

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.