Junk Drawer

The past two days I have been cleaning the “junk drawer” that place in the house where everything ends up being stashed. Every house has one I know this to be true. Some houses drawer s are not as big and as complicated as our but there there. I think the best junk drawers are those which are built into the house. I think being build into the structure give the drawer a level of credibility needed for the drawers job. The drawer must act as receptacle for the archeological history. Things which are not important enough to rate the mantle, front room books shelf or the top of the piano but still retain enough value to be saved from the garbage end up in the drawer. Sometimes, I think, to just distance the person from the object—with enough time the object will devalue to the point of being able to be thrown away. Alas the items end up in the drawer and then are forgotten to be layered over by the next level.

The junk drawer is a sad receptacle. In this drawer lies half finished project, games and toys—especially little things like knickknacks and mc Donald toys shrugged off after the happy meal turned sad. I don’t know if this drawer has even been cleaned since we moved here 15 years ago. I am sure it has but I found memorabilia for Starwars promotions from the late 90’s. I found hundreds of pencils (sharpened and never sharpened) pen with and with out tops. In fact one major project was going through and trying out each pen o see which were still useable. I bet I tossed over fifty pens. I think the best preserved pen over all is the Bic. There were more Bics which still worked then any other. There was one card game scattered all through the drawer, orange plastic ties and three medals on ribbons all tangled in boondoggle plastic. (you know that stuff you braid together to make key chains, bracelets which end up in the drawer. ) The boondoggle was tenacious wrapped in and around everything. In fact the boondoggle almost defeated me. I had to find just the right device to wrap the boondoggle on to wrap in to a manageable bow. That found, I separated the doggle from all the other junk in the drawer. This helped a lot. I ended up stuffing all the boondoggle into a sandwich bag. I wrapped the three extension cords into individual coils and secured them with rubber bands and stuck them in the “cord” drawer I keep in the “computer room”. Lanyards and plastic name holders broken glass frames and shoelaces were thrown away. Broken pieces of plastic and millions of pieces of paper-notes, lists grocery receipt tapes and dollars in change, mostly dimes, nickels and pennies most of it thrown away. We kept the money of course that can be recycled. I had almost forgotten what prompted the clean out. I was going to do some sketching and I needed one of those little hand held pencil sharpeners the ones the size of your thumb that all kids have kicking round their desk or in their pencil pouch or back pack which is always emptied, at the end of the year into the “junk drawer”.