The Bounty of our Lives

Does every family have a "junk drawer"? Randy and I have one in our armoire. It is mostly filled with old wrist watches, boxed cuff links, old wallets and coin purses, discarded cell phones, foreign coins, old buttons, safety pins, hotel sewing kits, peppermint candies picked up on the way out of restaurants, etc. But when I was a kid the "junk drawer" was a very important source (or resource) -- the first place you looked for things like scissors, string, a rubber band, scotch tape, a nail file, a pencil. Today we buy pens or pencils by the dozens or by the 100s, but if we couldn't find a pencil stub in the junk drawer (naturally the eraser had long since been used and we would bite on the metal band to try to get a tiny bit of eraser to poke out for one last erasure) we could spend an hour and never find a pencil. Today I keep a pair of scissors in almost every room of the house, including the bathrooms, TV room and garage, but if the one pair of scissors we owned didn't happen to be in the junk drawer you were pretty much out of luck.

Combs were another issue. We had two. One of them was always stuck in the sisal comb holder that hung next to the mirror in the bathroom. The other was on mother's dressing table. That's where we sat every morning while mother combed our hair and then either braided it or brushed it into wringlets. Removing either of those combs from their designated locations was a serious matter.

One of the things that Clarissa got for Christmas was a whole package of combs. Now I suppose that the combs were really for the benefit of her mother, as I don't know too many four-year-olds who write Santa for a package of combs. Lucky Tiffany. While my sister was raising her six children it seemed that "the comb" was always missing. Many a morning there was a minor crisis as the entire family searched high and low for the comb (which, of course, no one had seen or touched). A few weeks before Christmas on just such a morning my sister was fit to be tied by the time the children were out the door for school. When my brother-in-law said, "Sweetheart, what would you like for Christmas this year?" my sister replied, "Just a comb that I can find when I need it." That Christmas morning when she opened her gift she found a brand new comb. Harl had drilled a hole in it and attached a light-weight sixteen-foot chain which he then fastened around the leg of their king-sized bed. She got exactly what she wanted. Never had to look more than sixteen feet to find that comb!