Like fire, drawers possess two distinct attributes. They are both a boon to man and a source of possible disaster.
On the plus side, just imagine trying to manipulate throughout the day without those moveable compartments for undergarments, silverware and pencils. Somethings were just made to be stored in drawers. But you don’t have to look hard for the negative side.
While every family needs one junk drawer - a place for those odds and ends that just don’t belong anywhere else, why is it that children have a way of turning every drawer into a junk drawer?
Their motto seems to be - stuff whatever is to be picked up into the nearest drawer. Instead of taking a few steps to return the scissors to the appropriate slot, they are stuffed first in this drawer, then in that one. And the next would-be user screams and hollers that someone has ‘stolen’ the scissors.
I can never understand why gum wrappers and candy papers must be deposited in drawers when the wastepaper basket is so near. Oh, I’ve heard the usual explanation, “but, Mom, that’s our basketball goal!” Even more so, I’ll never understand the mystery of how those bits and pieces of nothing multiply so rapidly when hidden in the dark.
Then comes the day after all the laundry has been washed put away that one offspring calls out, “Mom, I don’t have any clean socks.” Putting reason aside, forgetting that you’ve just paired, folded, and neatly stored a half dozen or so socks in the proper drawer, you go look see. Sure enough that drawer has been taken over as the nesting place for the newest acquisition - be it hamster, rat or snake. Where are the socks? That’s a good question, but a good starting place is to look under to the bed. Sure enough cover with those accumulated dust balls are the once clean socks.
As infuriating as the contents of the drawers can be, the bane of every homemaker’s existence is the fact that drawers are rarely closed. As fast as children are concerned, drawers only work one way - they pull out. The young rarely seem to learn that they move in the opposite direction just as easily. And if, by some mistake the drawer is shoved closed, half of the contents are left hanging out.
Oh to walk into a room just once, with every drawer closed tightly, with no peek-a-boos showing - To make it perfect, all closet and cabinet doors would be tightly shut also. What a heavenly dream…
1976
Comments