Wade

wade
verb, intransitive. To walk through water or another liquid or soft substance.
Verb, transitive. To walk through something filled with water. "Wade through:" to read laboriously through a long piece of writing. "Wade into:" to get involved in something vigorously or forcefully. "Wade in:" to make a vigorous attack or intervention.

After planning for weeks, Marlie had all the components of her budget home-office upgrade ready. Now all she needed to do was sort through everything on top of the old writing desk and dispose of it. Some of that stuff had been piled there for years. She stood beside the chair and looked at the letter file, crammed with envelopes. Some of them contained family snapshots that she had never gotten around to placing in an album. She didn't dare throw the whole mess out because of those. The thought of the brittle, aged paper and the dust made her shudder.

There was no help for it. She had already cleared the computer desk. Doing the same to the older writing desk was a necessity. One end of it rested on one of the file cabinets destined to be a support for one end of the solid-core door that was to be the work surface of her new workstation. The file cabinet that would hold up the other end was waiting on the porch. Avidly, she thought of its empty drawers, waiting to hold the accumulated paperwork of the small business she had started a few months ago. The new home office was going to be a huge help, but first, she had to deal with the detritus of the past.

Marlie gazed out the window at the autumn leaves stippled with sunlight. She had taken a long exercise walk that morning, but it wouldn't hurt her to take another.... Faintly, she could hear voices as the children romped near Jim, who was tinkering with the lawnmower. Maybe she should join them instead of dealing with unfinished business and dust on such a fine afternoon....

"Stop it, Marlie," she chided. "Time's a wastin'" The only way to move ahead with her plan was to wade into this last project and deal with it. She sat, hitched the chair closer to the desk, and picked up the first piece of paper.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.