I have decided there is a lesson in that, and it is not a cynical one, though it sounds like it might be.

It is this: the protections we build are wiser than we are.

I built that system out of a narrow, specific fear, and it turned out to guard against a danger I was not even capable of imagining at the time I built it.

Perhaps that is the whole argument for building carefully, for documenting, for keeping the record even when you cannot conceive of ever needing it — that the danger you face is so often not the one you were bracing for, and the only defense that helps is the one you put in place before you knew what it was for.

I thought I was recording my home against strangers.

I was in fact, without knowing it, recording it against the day my own mother would decide my family was expendable.