Spring Cleaning The Junk Drawer

March 27th, 2010 - While drying dishes, at a friend's home, I pulled out several drawers in search of the silverwear drawer. As I was tugging very hard on one of the drawers my friend yelled, "STOP, that's the jumk drawer", and with that all the contents flew all over. My friend was motified, I was amused, after all it is not everyday that you get to see the hidden items in a 'jumk drawer'.

When I was a kid everyone I knew had a junk drawer. You know, a drawer that held all the odds and ends that you really didn't have a special place to store or that you were sure you would need someday in the near future. In here you could find rubber bands, tape, batteries, menus for fast food, coupons, old keys and scissors. And also underneath all the surface stuff you might find a bathroom shower hook, a joke from a piece of bazooka gum, and ofcourse several stale cough drops. When you needed to find something to finish a project your mom would yell, look in the junk drawer...that is unless you lived in our house. My mom had no concept of a 'junk drawer'. In a million years she could never comprehend why 'stuff' would be thrown in a drawer without any logical order to it. In our home, everything had a specific place, with a specific order, and often times were color coded. I was yellow! Any deviance to this order would probably cause the earth to fall off its axis or at least something equally tragic. It was almost as bad as coloring outside the lines. I was so excited when I moved into my own house and created my very own 'junk drawer'. Everytime my mom would visit she would wait til I wasn't around and try to clean it out. The 'junk drawer' fills up slowly. One piece at a time, and then one day you open it and stuff is overflowing, so you decide I will take 10 minutes and clean it out. Ha, don't make me laugh. I defy anyone to clean out the drawer in under an hour and a half. First you have to dump everything on the counter, and spend the next 10 minutes picking up all the items that are rolling off the counter and on to the floor. The rule goes, as you pick one item up and stand back up, another rolls off in a different direction. Great workout! Then you systematically begin to go through each item. This is the hard part, because there is no way you will be able to part with anything in this drawer. You just never know when you will need a business card size calendar from the year 2008, what if you need it for a trivia game. Or that one puzzle piece you found on the floor after all the cousins at Christmas took out the 10 puzzles and tried to build them all. Then hastily threw them back in the box and on the shelf when they were leaving. Two weeks later you found the piece. And the half dozen batteries that you have no way of knowing whether or not they are dead, until you really need them. But hey you have a one in six chance one will work. And every 'junk drawer' has at least one pencil size screwdriver and one mini flashlight, just in case.

I thought having a 'junk drawer' was a right of passage. And indeed it was was. It was my freedom to keep a home anyway I wanted without the rules of color coding. I could have a perfectly organized house, and still have the coveted 'junk drawer'. I feel liberated, and yes, everytime I go into my 'junk drawer' I am fondly reminded of my mom, and when I color code, which I do on occasion, I am still... Yellow .