Top Drawer Organization!

I think homes that are too tidy, neat and sparse look like nothing interesting is going on.
—Shelley Malec Vitale

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

—A.A. Milne

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.
—Erma Bombeck

I knew I was in trouble when a picture taken in 1970 fell out of a drawer while cleaning for Pesach. I have cleaned out the drawer a few times since 1970. In fact, I didn't even own the drawer in 1970. In fact again, this particular drawer hadn't even been ALIVE in 1970. Which means that I am, in fact, older than my drawer. But I digress.

Pesach (Passover) is an interesting time of year. I say interesting because, while cleaning out drawers and cupboards to dispose of all chametz in my possession, I find all sorts of interesting items all over the house; things that I never put in the places I find them; things I haven't thought about or seen in years; things I just replaced because I couldn't find them (sometimes I buy a replacement IN ORDER to find the original). 

An example of an interesting item is the aforementioned 1970 photo of myself and a bunch of siblings and relatives. Of course, I had to immediately stop the Pesach cleaning of the drawer to whatsapp these people and tell them all about my find, which, in turn, spurred a half hour whatsapp messaging conversation about white leotards, red dresses, bar mitzvah presents, and the need to make Aliyah. 

It also put back my Pesach cleaning by over an hour. This is because the messaging didn't include the time it took me to find just the right youtube video for the punchline of a joke. Plus, I had to explain the joke because apparently the Old Country doesn't have youtube and couldn't see the video (must be all the snow hahahahahaha). All these things take time. 

If the whatsapping wasn't time-consuming enough, I also found, in the very same drawer, about 37 different and very interesting keys. Obviously, I had to try out the various keys to see if any of them opened anything at all in the house. This included doors, windows, cupboards, padlocks, bike locks, those itsy bitsy tiny little baby locks one puts on suitcases, and my jewelry box where I keep safety pins and buttons that have fallen off my shirts. (The safety pins were to keep the buttonless shirts closed.) The jewelry box turned out not to have a lock at all, but I did spend quite some time looking through the buttons searching for interesting ones, and wondering if I still had any of the shirts. I put the shirtless buttons (i.e., all of them) back into the jewelry box and returned to the task of sorting through the 37 keys that had, in that time, grown to 52 keys. 

As nothing matched any lock in the house (all the cupboards are now drooping open), 94 minutes after I took the keys out of the drawer, I replaced them all carefully and neatly in a corner of the drawer so that I would have room to sort through the myriad of fridge magnets that had settled under the keys. Magnets for pizza or hamburgers, magnets for plumbers and insurance agents, magnets for flower and spice shops, a magnet from the gas supplier, and three magnets for locksmiths. Alas, none of them were particularly interesting, though there was one from someone's wedding from a few years ago, and I didn't recognize one of the people. It took me several minutes of asking around to pin the identity of that person down. In the end, I had over 30 magnets taking up room in the drawer. So I did what any right minded person would do. I alphabetized them, but put the locksmith magnets on top so that they would be handy if I were ever locked out of my house. This part of the project only took 46 minutes. Because I've done it so many times before, I didn't have to think about it too much. 

Next in the drawer came the loose elastic bands, bits of ribbon, more safety pins, pen tops, Barbie doll heads and arms, and the end bits of colored pencils and crayons. I carefully separated the various items, located the individual baggies that they had all fallen from and returned them to their correct bag. This year, I did something new, however. I labeled the baggies, so when the items next fall out, I would be able to simply scoop the item back into the correct bag. I also opened a new bag for old takeout menus from restaurants that no longer exist. I did find a very interesting crayon where a blue bit had mushed into the yellow crayon. I showed it to everyone around, but then I threw it out. It was hard, but the relief was palpable. 

Finally, seventeen hours and ten minutes after opening the drawer, I closed it with a sigh. 

Another 33 drawers and cupboards to go. 

It's amazing how much junk can accumulate in one house in one short year, especially when four people are locked up together.