You know what it is…everyone has one.  Let me qualify that statement:  REAL people have at least one junk drawer.  It's the drawer where anything that needs to go away quickly goes.  It's the place that things with no specific place end up.  It's where something that you know you'll need eventually will go because you know that as soon as you throw it away, you'll need it and you will have to kick yourself for tossing it.  It's a deep, dark abyss that has a little of everything, but nothing that you can find when you need it.  Which is what brings me to my current situation.

As I have been decorating for Halloween, it came time to put batteries in the glowing/moaning/moving pieces.  All of them require unscrewing/screwing the battery compartment before/after the batteries go it.  It only takes one time of leaving batteries in a battery-operated pumpkin/masked teddy bear/mummified wiener dog/crawling hand for a year in storage before you find battery acid leaking and ruining your investment to learn THAT lesson…I lie…it happens at least once a decade.  Where was I…oh, yes.  I needed a very small Phillip's head screw driver.  So I went to THE JUNK DRAWER…I was, of course, unsuccessful.  To be honest, this is not where I put stuff – none of it is MY junk.  But I was hoping that the screw driver might have found its way to THE JUNK DRAWER so that I could continue and finish my holiday task.  It became something shiny*.

I really didn't have "clean out THE JUNK DRAWER" on my list for the day, but when I found the electric carving knife and blades out of their box and protective sleeves and when I open the knife box and found an opened package of wooden skewers (whose bright idea was that?) I decided that I couldn't leave sharp knife blades floating around THE JUNK DRAWER…that was just foolish…but one thing led to another, and another, and another until I found myself sorting and bagging and washing and cleaning and inventorying the contents of the drawer…yes I made a list:  10 bouncy balls, 6 marbles, 2 rulers, 1 wire cutter, 1 wrench, 1 pair of needle-nose pliers, 1 large flat head screwdriver and one small one; a comb and toenail clippers (which have been put back where they belong as they DO have a permanent place to go); 11 bag clippies, a huge handful of individually packaged hand wipes, 6 pennies (two of them smashed), 2 dimes, 1 nickel; 3 key rings with no keys, 3 rings with no fingers big enough in the house to fit them anymore, but you can't get rid of your CTR (Choose the Right) rings!; 2 tape measures – one 3 feet and the other 12 feet; 1 pin backing, a locker combination, 2 rocks, 3 shells, 1 golf ball, 33 rubber bands – all tried and still good; 1 water gun, 1 army man, a 1" Godzilla, 1 Goofy Pez dispenser, a Harry Potter necklace and a Series 1 Collector Set of Harry Potter stones, a 3" tall orange plastic medication bottle (with white cap) full of springs, screws, nuts, bolts, washers and finishing nails; a couple hands full of things that I have absolutely no idea what they are so I can't tell you, 4 pads of paper (assorted sizes), a gallon ZipLoc bag full of pencils, crayons, markers and pens PLUS this little poem (I don't know who wrote it or authored it…on a scrap of torn paper) which reads:

Poof! Be gone! Your breath's too strong. 

Wait: come back! You need a tic-tac! 

Not a tic, not a tac…But the whole darn pack!

 
(punctuation added)

 My JUNK DRAWER is now organized, but I know that won't last.  So goes my life.  I COULD bring myself to throw away old receipts, CoffeeMate Creamer (since no one in this house drinks coffee and I don't have any idea how long they've been in there) and expired Boxtops for Education.  I COULD NOT bring myself to throw away all those little things that I have no idea what they are because they might just be someone else's lost treasure.  I never found what I was looking for in that drawer, but made do with a small flat head screwdriver that I found somewhere else.  The masked bear no longer works, but I'll see if Scott can fix it…he fixes everything (almost everything)!  The decorating is finished until we start carving the real pumpkins and making the Halloween treats.  Tonight I will blissfully watch a favorite "not-too-scary" Halloween movie (maybe The Witches or Hocus Pocus or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), eating popcorn and drinking hot apple cider and feel at peace within my own little universe.  I wonder how long it will take those that use THE JUNK DRAWER to notice and wonder if I tossed away anything important…there could be trouble.  But until then, life is good.

*Shiny things – anything that distracts one from completing the task one sets about to do.