As I sit, I am looking at a container with six, plastic, long-handled iced-tea-style spoons. The colors are fun and bright - orange, lime-green, yellow, sapphire blue, aqua-blue and red. I remember buying the spoons two or three summers ago, keeping one set on the Aqua RV and bringing the other set home, intending to put the home set out for general usage, but putting it away and then forgetting about the set.......until I discovered them last night when I cleaned and organized my office closet.
Digging back into the depths of the closet, my quest for order yielded many forgotten treasures and other items that need to be forgotten. One of the more fascinating discoveries was a 6"X10" Rubbermaid container that, clearly marked, had dozens of shoestrings, leather strings, and other "strings" of questionable origin and purpose. This container's existence must have kept its roots from long ago - like twenty years and longer - when my children were young and wore tennis shoes with shoe strings and boots that required leather ties. The container also held various bits of string in different colors as well as multiple spools of packing string....from back in the day when you mailed a package in brown paper and tied with string. That method of package-wrapping has long since been discarded and disallowed by the US Postal Service. If it were spring, I would have laid all the string pieces out on the lawn for the birds to use in nest building. I also found a thirty-plus year old nylon rope used as a clothesline for camping trips.
My closet organization and cleaning spilled over into the drawers of my sewing desk as well as the little office-shelf organizer on my desk, right behind my laptop. Between these two places I found numerous tiny, zippered plastic bags, one even had two screws in it for eyeglasses. Also being saved for posterity were about a dozen paper sacks, each about two-by-three inches. I located an old, family sugar-cookie recipe that I had searched the condo for - upside and downside, inside and outside - during this past winter, coming to the conclusion that I must have accidentally discarded the recipe. Now, Aunt Ruby's sugar-cookie recipe will once again come to life as a family favorite.
There is still "stuff" on the shelves and in drawers that needs to be thrown away, but maybe I'll save it for another deep cleansing. I have a dozen, or more, hand-crocheted dishcloths that will last me until my grandchildren graduate from college. I have enough mailing envelopes that could supply a new US Postal Station, and I have enough term-paper covers to wallpaper the halls of Congress.....none of which are practical or useful since I don't think college (or high school) students actually turn in hard-copy papers any longer.
Maybe I should just open up my own museum?
Ancora imparo
