Saturday, December 12, 2020

After 13 Years, I Clean

Nutty with quarantine I cleaned a shelf I'd covered with newspaper back in 2007. Hadn't cleaned it since. It's a closet for canned goods, nobody sees it, and a bottle of balsamic vinegar exploded in there four or five summers ago, so I was extra reluctant but cleaned it, one shelf took 30 minutes, and laid down a sheet of 2020 newspaper as a reminder to clean that shelf again in 2033. A few days ago I manned up and organized the junk drawer. 
 
To my delight it yielded an end cap for a chair leg, five kinds of tape (scotch, masking, electrical, strapping tape, pink barrier tape), numerous craft sticks, two partly-burnt sage bundles, twine, red gift ribbon, 13 keys and various scraps of velcro I will surely need after I throw them away, and an NOAA weather radio, a transistor, useful until I moved out here, too far from a tower to catch a signal. The water-purification tablets got transferred to the camping-gear drawer. NOAA now broadcasts through an app. Packaged hardware for an office chair, long since given away, I had labeled and dated: again, 2007. Rather than tossing it I kept it. Who knows when I'll need it? That's what a junk drawer is for: contingencies. This is the "after" picture.

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