The Truth, The Lie and a Clean Kitchen Drawer

Recently I posted a picture on Facebook of a beautifully arranged drawer.  Indeed, it deserved all the attention it got.  With a cutlery tray in it to keep various tools and tape and batteries rigidly held in place, it's an example of organizational perfection rarely found in my house.

While the drawer still looks as good as it did when the picture was taken, it's a bit of an illusion.  Maybe even a lie.  Even as the picture was being taken, there were items sitting on the counter that I had taken from the drawer and not yet replaced.  The drawer had been a frightening mess and if I put everything back in it, cutlery tray or not, there would still be clutter.  So I took a plastic box, dumped a bunch of stuff in it and put it away.  Now it's the linen closet's problem.

I don't foresee a need to open the box anytime soon.  Every item in it must have a use but we don't know what those uses are.  There are brackets capable of holding substantial items on walls.  Items are not falling off the walls though - things seem secure.  I've seen ends of flashlights but I don't see flashlights lying around the house, fully functional if only they had their ends.  There are two pointy pieces that look they belong on the bottom of furniture.  How did we end up with two pieces?  And what looks like a vacuum cleaner filter is clean and new but I don't think we have its vacuum anymore.  We don't need these things in a drawer in the kitchen.  It's possible we don't need these things at all.

The problem is that while we might not need any of these things, we might need some of them.   Maybe we'll need only one of them.  It'd be nice to have whatever we need and frustrating to know we'd thrown something out.  So, I'm keeping it all, just in case.

I'm glad it's only one plastic box of unknown pieces that I have and not a whole house of things we might need some day and can't throw it.  That's hoarding and that's sad.  It's strange though that things collect as they do and amazing that, these days, our belongings seem to come with their own belongings.  It's really easy for clutter to build up.

I'll be pretty happy, I suppose, if one day soon things start falling off the walls and I come across flashlights without ends, furniture that needs pointy things and the vacuum that would use that filter.  Until that glorious day, my box and I will wait.  And I hope the kitchen drawer stays camera-ready.  Sure, I just shuffled elsewhere to get it like that but it really does like nice.  And I hope the box and linen closet can work things out.

JAHD