(I was confused. This column is to coincide with my column in The Press-Sentinel's Senior Living supplement this week. Both this column and "Learning Retirement" will remain the active columns until March 6, 2023.)
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 the moveable compartments for undergarments, silverware and pencils. Some things 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 the 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 and 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 news 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 the bed. Sure enough, covered with those accumulated dust balls, are the once clean socks.
As infuriating as the contents of the drawers can be, one bane of every homemaker’s existence is the fact that the drawers are rarely closed. As far as children are concerned, drawers work only one way…they pull out. They never seem to learn that they move in the opposite direction just as easily. And if, by some mistake, the drawer is shoved closed, half 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
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