I started sprucing up my house this week, doing the usual housework, you know dusting and vacuuming and wiping down the counters. I don’t have a ton of visitors so it’s easy to let things slide because who cares if the kitchen counters have wine stains, or the refrigerator drawers contain blooming science projects also known as moldy lettuce. Not me, I’m happy if my dishwasher washes the grime off my plates and my kitchen sink is sort of white.
We have lived in this house for about fifteen years, and I knew that I needed to spend an hour, maybe a little more, combing through some drawers and cupboards that I hadn’t opened since we moved in. I started with the bathroom and opened the bottom drawer, thinking it would be the easiest because it less obvious than the others. I had cut Tom’s hair for over twenty years, and found two sets of hair clippers, along with two dozen combs, only one of which was used because comb companies insist you buy a bag, multiple sizes and colors. The hair clippers mostly worked, but I can’t cut my own hair and I’m sure that the thrift stores would not take used clippers that have hair chunks still attached. I tossed out both clippers and doubt I will miss them. I pulled out a shoebox that I hadn’t seen in a long time, maybe fifteen years, and found lots of important things, like buttons, golf pencils, a whistle, a few paper clips, and an unfilled written pain relief prescription from 2004 from a doctor who died in 2011. I don’t remember why I went to the doctor, but I must have gotten over the ailment with nothing more than aspirin. I also found a few bottles of over-the-counter drugs that had expired several years ago, about the same time as the doctor died, making me wonder if the two were connected.
I moved to another cupboard that I didn’t remember existed and found it had become a flourishing cap farm, because there were about a hundred caps in the cupboard, maybe more. Who knows where and when they came from? Last year I thought I had disposed of all my extra caps kindly donating a few dozen of them from my travels to my grandkids so they could start their own cap farms, and I don’t know where these came from. Did some little gnome or leprechaun sneak into my house and deposit them? What should I do with them? Some were well loved (meaning they were on the grimy side) and thrift stores probably have rules about ball caps, but if I send them to the dump, do they go into the recycle bin or does the trash service have a special code for grime and grit laden caps. Maybe they should.
Three hours and ten minutes later I had filled a trash can and was thinking about other things like writing this blog and deciding whether to tackle another project tomorrow. In the meantime, I have a half-full bottle of wine that needs my attention. Cheers.
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