Every home has a random junk drawer.

Just as the accounting profession has a miscellaneous cost center, every home has a miscellaneous drawer. Or, as I’ve always called it, a random junk drawer.

Ours is in the kitchen. Actually, it’s two drawers since all of the random items that we can’t bring ourselves to toss won’t fit into just one.

I was about to toss a clothespin into the larger drawer, when I realized just how much stuff was in there.

An inventory of the larger drawer contained mostly kitchen utensils, such as spatulas, potato mashers, garlic presses and cheese graters. Notice that was plural.

How is it that one household needs five spatulas, two potato mashers, three garlic presses and three cheese graders?

But wait, there’s more.

My drawer exploration also turned up canning supplies, tons of bread twist ties, and several spring-loaded clips for potato chip bags that were giveaway items from various companies. My favorite chip clip is the one from a hospital. Because nothing promotes good health better than keeping those Doritos from going stale, right?

The smaller drawer was more of a time capsule. I found two ashtrays, a large box of strike anywhere matches, and multiple matchbooks with a logo from a restaurant that went out of business two presidencies ago.

I also found two decaf 5-hour Energy drinks. Do decaf and energy drinks even belong in the same sentence, much less stamped together on a product? How did this even get into our house without finding its way to anywhere other than the trash?

The most random thing was the pump nozzle from one of those small bottles of hand soap. He was hiding behind one of the garlic presses next to the hospital potato chip clip.

As I stood back and looked at both of these open drawers, I felt inspired to drag all of their contents onto the counter, sort through it, throw out what we didn’t need and organize the rest.

After all, it was laziness that got these drawers into this condition, and we could certainly use the space.

I picked up the first item and then I stopped. I thought about the consequences of throwing out something my wife wanted to keep. Heck, for that matter, what if I needed one of these items later?

I wrote a note on a Post-It, placed the Post-It in the clothespin and put it at the back of the big drawer. Along with the date, it reads:

“John, today you were going to organize this drawer. It’s not hurting a thing. Don’t you have anything better to do? Go check the Doritos and make sure they’re not stale.”

©2014 John Moore