February, 2004:
on opening a drawer

By most standards our home is quite small. We have two bedrooms, one small storage room that serves as a bedroom, a small kitchen, one bath, a salon where eight people start to feel crowded, and a study. There's little storage area, and things are strewn all around the house. In circumstances such as these it's relatively easy to misplace things, but not necessarily for very long. Yet it definitely is possible to forget about some objects almost completely.

My sock drawer gets opened, at least during the winter, very often, but I hardly plunge deeper than the surface. Many a pair of unworn socks are just below that surface. I can most probably throw them out without having this affect my life in any way. And if I rarely get beyond the surface socks, I almost never take a look at what's even farther down in that (relatively shallow) drawer.

But there's lots to be found there. Mostly these are objects which I apparently held in my hands at some point and didn't know what to do with them, so I simply stuffed them into the closest available drawer. The result is a collection of objects with no particular connection between them, other than the fact that I don't need them. At the very least, their place, if they have one, isn't in that drawer. These are basically "out of sight, out of mind" objects which I've forgotten about ... until recently, when reaching for a clean pair of socks, my hand penetrated a bit deeper than usual, and pulled out something that, well, seemed rather out of place. And this offered me the opportunity to do a bit of exploring.

I offer here only part of the uncovered treasure.