Somehow my system started trying to run soffice when I clicked on any folder selection under “Places”

I did a bunch of searches and finally found that:

jim:~$ xdg-mime query default inode/directory
libreoffice-writer.desktop

So I did

jim:~$ xdg-mime default caja-folder-handler.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search

Which corrected the problem.