Junk Drawer

As a child, the boisterous games of my cousins and other children did not appeal to me. When visiting family, I would sit quietly, sometimes with a picture book, or sometimes listening to the adults talk, holding a favourite plush toy.

Aunt Lilifrid kept a special treat for my visits, however – a drawer in the kitchen that was full of an assortment of strange things, wonders to my eyes. Buttons and paperclips, old Cracker-Jack prizes, little figurines that came as premiums with her favorite tea, and the odd devices that Fuller-Brush salesmen left when one placed an order.

One by one, I would pull things out, disentangle them from the string or ribbon that always seemed to wrap itself around everything in the drawer. I would place each familiar item into lines of similar things: figurine with figurine, plastic doodad with plastic doodad. Each new item would be scrutinized carefully, before I decided in which category it belonged.

But the treasure, which I always returned carefully to its box when the visit was done, and hid once again at the very back of the drawer, was a golden ring in a velvet box. Why it was there, I never knew.