Last Call: Regale Us With The Contents Of Your Junk Drawers
The junk drawer is a sacred institution, one that deserves our respect. As much as the junk drawer might perplex us, it is an essential part of any home. Its existence amounts to an admission by one and all that no matter how organized a person may be, no matter how much Marie Kondo may gently scold us from her perch inside the recesses of our brains, every one of us has an assemblage of possessions that just don't fit. They cannot be contained by any earthly filing drawer or neatly labeled box. They must be accessible at all times, but stick out at odd angles and defy any attempt to sort them. The day you stop requiring a junk drawer is the day you've stopped living life to its fullest.
What's inside the junk drawer is as variable as our fingerprints, and a lot more illustrative. I was once complimented on the quality of my junk drawer and I'll carry that pride around with me until I die. The best ones are a combination of needs, wants, and didn't-know-you-neededs, plus a few things thrown in just to make you laugh. The most characteristic thing in my junk drawer is rubber bands. I carefully remove them from every newspaper, bundle of asparagus, and egg carton and whisk them to my junk drawer, declaring aloud in my kitchen, "Oh, this is a good one—we'll have lots of uses for you." I'm a planner by nature, and knowing that I will never want for a rubber band in this life is immensely soothing to me.
In polling The Takeout's staff, it sounds like pet-related doodads are a unanimous inclusion in the junk drawer ecosystem: canine snow boots, bow tie collars, tennis balls. Other, more random items include foam beer koozies, shoelaces, appliance manuals, measuring tape, plastic straws from takeout orders, stray chess pieces, gum, and drained batteries that never got disposed of.
What about you, reader? What items within your junk drawer describe you even better than your loved ones can? And is your junk drawer in your kitchen, or somewhere else... like every single room of the house?