The lost pieces of our lives

The junk drawer: the catch-all of every American household and a nightmare to clean. I cannot actually attest to cleaning the drawer, but I recently had to “tidy it up” because I was on the hunt for a set of keys.

Before I found those keys, I had to wade through an incredible menagerie of paraphernalia that had been accumulated by my family throughout our daily lives. There were standard tools that included tape, paper clips, screw drivers, batteries, and a calculator, but there were also items unique to my own personal use.

One of these was an electronic tire pressure gauge that my husband stuffed in my Christmas stocking a few years ago.  You see, I have a problem with tires wearing out faster than they should and, during a certain period of time a while back, I would lose pressure in one tire more than the others. He thought I would attend to my tire issue if I had a handy tool at my disposal, but that was not the case as evidenced by said tool’s placement in the drawer rather than the car.

A few other items related to my status as a nursing student, like the several dozen alcohol prep pads, a pocket-sized hand sanitizer, and a saline-filled 3 mL syringe used to flush intravenous sites.

There were 3 boxes of birthday candles and a pedometer which had one thing in common: all of them had been barely used. Also underutilized was a package of reinforcement labels. In case you are unaware as to how these are applied, they are the little, round, white rings that repair the torn holes of notebook paper that has been ripped out of a binder. I bought them for a binder-style text book three years ago and, out of the 544 labels available, I have used four. Now the mostly full pack floats around the junk drawer all year long.

We also store a tube of almost worthless vinyl adhesive. The last time we put this to good use was when my sister’s dog chewed on our 12 foot vinyl pool. Unfortunately, the abundance of canine teeth holes proved too much for the pool patch kits to handle.

I discovered a variety of needless cards too. Some were business cards, but a few of them actually held value at one time. A drink vendor promised riches with a scratch-off code that had to be checked online by December of 2010. I finally threw that one away.

We also own five Blockbuster Video reward cards which each entitle us to 2 movies, 2 Coca-Cola beverages, 2 theater candies, and popcorn. These would have been nice to redeem back when we had a Blockbuster in town, but I know for a fact that we didn’t have them in our possession until after the store closed. We keep them in case we travel to a city that has one still in business.

The keys are the real mess. I found the boat key which was hard to miss considering the fact that it has a huge, floatable keychain attached to it. What astounds me is that, out of the 34 keys in the junk drawer, I have no clue what 22 of them unlock or start up. Amazing.

For the time being, most of the drawer’s mysteries shall remain shrouded in secrecy. I have places to go and people to see and, goodness knows, I’ve got enough keys to take me there.