Giving in to an urge to purge
It doesn’t happen every year, but every so often as one year flows into the next I get a hankering to clean out cupboards and drawers.
If I were more disciplined in my cleaning regimen, it wouldn’t be such a monumental task. It was no surprise that in one of our cavernous cupboards I found a few outdated items, such as a box of cake flour I once bought for a special made-from-scratch birthday cake.
The box was almost full but had an expiration date of 2012, so that was pitched, along with a bottle of chocolate syrup that expired in 2011 but was buried under a mountain of bags of noodles.
I spent an entire day ridding my kitchen cupboards of things that had languished way too long on the shelves, and it felt good to get it done. The job’s not finished yet, though. I still have a seemingly endless number of bathroom drawers to tackle.
And the infamous “junk drawer” still awaits.
My mother always had the same kind of drawer, though hers was much smaller. It was the catch-all place where we could find paper clips, Scotch tape, scissors and all kinds of useful household tidbits. I’m guessing other people have such drawers in their homes.
My junk drawer is fairly big and deep and has been sorely neglected for years. As I quickly surveyed the tangled mess (the actual cleaning of said drawer hasn’t occurred yet), I recognized cellphone chargers that probably date back to the late 1990s and various other cords for who knows what. There are spare keys to vehicles we no longer own and about 15 dozen pens and pencils. It will take a serious investment of time and patience to bring order to this mess.
Directly above my junk drawer, located in an antique oak secretary desk with a drop front, is a collection of aging stationery, greeting cards and sundry other items. Why I saved three leftover party invitations to one of my daughter’s childhood birthdays is a mystery to me. I’ll never have use of the cutesy cards adorned with pink unicorns. Why do I have an unused Hungry Horse News calendar from 1995? Again, who knows, though it may be because I wanted to save the calendar’s scenic photos.
My pack-rat genes are well-developed. Both of my parents were savers in their heyday. Mom quite literally saved everything, from used wrapping paper to several hundreds of pounds of magazines that took quite some time and effort to remove when we emptied the farmhouse a few years ago.
Dad’s endless inventory of tools, screws, nails etc. are still in a huge shop building on the farm, virtually untouched since he passed away five years ago. He, too, amassed quite a collection of stuff because “you never know when I’ll need...” Some day my siblings and I will be forced to empty Dad’s shop — and it will be a monumental task.
Their frugality was shaped by surviving the Great Depression, and I’m guessing some of their tendency to save things was passed onto us.
Keeping order to things and disposing of unneeded items seems like a good New Year’s resolution, I guess. And the world won’t end if I don’t get to the junk drawer for a while.
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.