String too short; saved anyway

Our personal year begins the week before Thanksgiving. This one is going to be a year of shedding. Kitchen drawers are cleaned out. Including the “junk drawer” (8 bazillion thrice used twist ties, press and seal saran wrap, bread bag clips, plastic safety scissors, batteries—some leaky, some not) and the drawer that was home to the instruction manuals of lost appliances. Not only is this stuff we haven’t used in years, even while we were living here, but it is stuff that there was little reason to save in the first place.

Before you chime in, yes, the twist ties have come in use in a Thrifty New Englander kind of way, sealing up bags of frozen vegetables, closing bread bags repurposed as cheese containers, and being peeled of their plastic to become a reset actuator for the tiny reset hole in my MP3 player. Rewound they became handy hangers for decorations, or stitch and row markers. It wasn’t that they were not still useful, but just that re-using them once would probably have been enough. And that keeping them for their third or fourth round of usefulness, while still adding to the collection with fresh acquisitions seems, this morning anyway, to border on hording. The same goes for the zip-ties from the days when a roll of trash bags game with both zip and twist ties that you could tear off a bundle, giving consumers the choice they apparently craved in how to fasten a garbage bag. You see how old this stuff is.

In the kitchen tool drawers we found medicine syringe parts. Not the kind that had needles. No. The kind that you used to squirt antibiotic far enough back in an infant’s throat that they had no choice but to swallow. Our kids are now in their twenties and none of these parts actually fit with each other. I may have been saving those, and the nearly useless garlic presses to create doughy strings for gingerbread people, or baked birds’ nests. I can’t imagine. Or, rather, I can imagine, but I certainly never followed through. New England thriftiness, or something darker?

To my credit there are some things (OK one thing) that had proved worth saving. There is the Revere triple-clad fry pan that lost its black composite handle. I used it as a stove-top to oven pan before I discovered the joys of Le Creuset, and last night as a cover for a handled fry pan. Apparently one thing I didn’t hoard was fry-pan / large pot covers.