Nearly every house has a black hole, a place where things disappear never to be found again.
My mother called it the “utility drawer.” In other people’s houses I’ve heard it called a “junk drawer” but we weren’t allowed to call it that at home.
Well, now I’m the mom, and I have no problem calling a spade a spade.
Every few years the junk drawer is cleaned out and organized and, indeed, it serves wonderfully as a utility drawer for at least several months, until it all starts to disintegrate again.
A junk drawer is a wonder of discoveries. A lot of the stuff is useful, such as safety pins, pens, scissors, Super Glue, the good Phillips head screwdriver, the little bitty screwdrivers you have to use on your glasses every few years when a leg comes aloose. There are regular twisters, those paper-wrapped little wires for holding bags shut, and the really good thick silver-colored ones that come off coffee bags.
Our junk drawer is a little crowded because it also holds a few easy-grab flower shears and the dog’s alternate collar.
Then there’s all sorts of things that seem important when you get ahold of them, so you save them for when you’ll need them.
Rubber bands always seem worth saving, and in the junk drawer they get all twisted up around and among other things. We always collect them and rarely use them.
The king of the rubber bands that really must be saved are those thick, sturdy ones that come around asparagus or broccoli stems. We’re going to need that for something one day!
And of course, it’s the home to seasonal items that have shown up after the holiday boxes have been put back in storage: Christmas ornament hooks, tiny Easter eggs, orange crocheted pumpkin shapes we stick over doorknobs during Halloween decorating then around Easter notice are still there.
The catch with all those waiting-for-next-holiday items is: When we’re decorating for that next holiday, will we remember to see what stragglers are in the junk drawer?
The junk drawer also is home to all those tiny things that belong somewhere else but at the moment of stashing do not seem worth crossing the house or going upstairs to put away, such as miniature battery-operated candles that we put on windowsills in winter.
The irony is that when we finally need something from the junk drawer, it’s not there. Where is the good Phillips head screwdriver, the scissors with the red handles, that great twister from the coffee bag that would be perfect to close up the granola bag?
So, except for the every-couple-of-years cleanout, the junk drawer is more of a black hole where things fall off the face of the earth.
Except for the proof that they really haven’t, when there’s so much stuff in there that sometimes you can hardly open or shut the drawer.
