The Junk Drawer

   We have lived in the same house for fifty-five years. One top drawer in the kitchen cupboards has always been the junk drawer. When my daughter got married, she said she is not going to have a junk drawer. But the first time we went to visit them, she had a junk drawer. She said a person just needs to have a place to put things like that. Maybe you have a junk drawer too but gave it a more dignified name. 

   What is in my junk drawer? Mostly things that are needed ranging from every day to never. The scissors is used almost every day. A pen, pencil, ruler, scrap paper for writing grocery lists, scotch tape, and matches are used frequently. The junk drawer is also a bank for new batteries, recipes I clipped to try someday, a pill bottle repurposed to store thumb tacks, a jar of little screws and bits of hardware that might be useful sometime, a bag of keys that has outlived their usefulness because nobody remembers what they were for, a small paint brush that is there because that's where it always was.

    Sometimes I empty the junk drawer and reorganize it. But my German thriftiness balks at throwing things away that might be useful someday. So the recipes I never got around to trying, the bag of unknown keys, jar of little screws, and paint brush go back in the drawer. 

    My junk drawer has been there for fifty-five years, but my memory drawer reaches back much further. My earliest vague memories were just before and after I turned three years old. They became clear by the age of five and continued to this day. One drawer isn't big enough to hold that many years of memories so it became a file cabinet. Everything is still in there but I can't always find the right folder in the right drawer of the file cabinet. I give up and then all of a sudden it pops up when I'm not thinking about it.

     Like the contents of my junk drawer, I use some memories every day. For example, remembering how to read and type. Other things I use frequently, such as telling a story or singing by memory. There are other memories that (like the bag of keys) serve no good purpose and should be discarded and forgotten. Good intentions that were never acted upon are (like the unused recipes) not worth the space they take up. There are ideas (like the jar of screws) for things I want to do sometime but never get around to it. And things which I think must be done a certain way because that's the way we've always done it, are like the paint brush which has no good reason for being where it is.

    Memories can be useful or like useless clutter in a junk drawer. Discarding the clutter frees up space for the useful.