The Junk Drawer

Every house has at least one. Ours has several.

There’s one beside my dresser in the bedroom. Another in the kitchen next to the knife drawer. The basement has one too. That one is more like a small archaeological dig.

They’re junk drawers.

Junk drawers are the great equalizer of American homes. Rich or poor, young or old, every family has at least one. They’re one part time machine, one part museum, and one part landfill.

A junk drawer is where useful things go to wait until they become useless - or where useless things go because you just can’t part with them.

Mine contains, among other things: four pairs of fingernail clippers, two pairs of toenail clippers, golf tees, dead watches, an expired driver’s license, charging cords for phones we got rid of three upgrades ago, pocket knives too dull to cut a  banana, an eyeglass repair kit, a VCR instruction manual, a half dozen mystery keys, enough loose screws to assemble a lawn mower, four old batteries,  three plastic pens, two toy cars, and a partridge in a pear tree. 

And underneath all that clutter is a pile of more pennies than you’d find in a mall wishing well.

If my whole life were like this, I would have already appeared on Hoarders.

Every junk drawer contains a number of items no one can identify. Parts that look like they might be important, but you can’t remember what they go to. 

“What’s this little plastic doohickey?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we throw it away?”

“Absolutely not. The minute we do, something in the house will quit working.”  

I use the junk drawer as a general depository - I’ll  put something in there so I’ll know where to find it when I need it. That works in theory. However, when I begin putting everything in the drawer, it defeats the purpose. 

Six months later, I’m digging through a tangled mess of charging cords that looks like a bowl of linguine. What was I thinking?

That could be why we rarely clean them out. My junk drawer is so heavy it nearly falls out of the dresser when I pull it out. 

That is, if I can even pull it out. Usually, it’s so overstuffed that something way in the back makes it hang up. About the only way to pry it loose is with a tire tool. Which is in the basement junk drawer. Naturally.   

Of course, once I finally get the drawer open, I spend five minutes rummaging through paper clips, expired coupons, and enough twist ties to secure every loaf of bread in Alabama - only to discover the item I needed wasn’t in there after all. It was in the kitchen junk drawer. Naturally.

When did opening a drawer become a visit to the Twilight Zone?

And I tell myself I’m  going to organize it someday. I’ll buy little plastic trays, label the sections, and finally bring order out of chaos - for a little while. Then about  two weeks later, I’ll casually toss in a key chain, a handful of change, and a couple of leftover screws.  And the next thing I know, nature has reclaimed the habitat.

And the answer is not a bigger junk drawer. Junk is like water, it seeks its own level. A bigger junk drawer just means more junk.

As I rummaged through this mess, I discovered that somewhere beneath the rubber bands, dried-up markers, and mystery parts are little pieces of my life. A ticket stub. An old Boy Scout  pocketknife. A key to a house we no longer own. 

For example, the most recent addition to my junk drawer was my dad’s self-winding watch. Sadly, the repairman said parts for it were no longer available. But that old timepiece still seems far too important to throw away.

I suppose it’s the same reason I don’t take my Mom’s contact information out of my cell phone. I know she’ll never answer. But somehow, deleting it would feel like losing her one more time.

Maybe a junk drawer isn’t just full of junk.

Maybe it’s just where memories wait until we need them again. 

Except for the toenail clippers. 

#junkdrawers