The Junk Drawer

Every house has one, and everyone knows exactly which drawer it is: the junk drawer. The one in the kitchen, usually, that opens on a chaos of the uncategorizable — a tangle of rubber bands and twist ties, dead batteries kept beside live ones because no one can tell them apart, keys to locks that no longer exist, a single glove, takeout menus for closed restaurants, a tape measure, birthday candles, the manual for an appliance three appliances ago, a handful of foreign coins, screws that go to nothing, a small screwdriver, and the pervasive sense that somewhere in here is the exact thing you will need someday and will not be able to find. It is the drawer where a household puts everything that has no home, and it is the most honest room in the house, and after a death it is unbearable to open, and it takes a while to understand why.

Here is why. The junk drawer is the one place in the house that nobody curated. Everything else, even the messy places, involved some choosing — the bookshelf reflects taste, the closet reflects decisions, the photographs were selected, the keepsakes were kept on purpose. But the junk drawer is pure accretion, the sediment of daily life, formed with no intention at all, one small deposit at a time — I don’t know where this goes, put it in the drawer — over years and years, until it holds a completely unedited record of a household’s actual existence. And unedited is exactly what makes it devastating, because the curated things show you the person they meant to present, and the junk drawer shows you the person they simply were: practical, hopeful, disorganized, thrifty, forgetful, human, keeping the rubber bands because you never know, keeping the dead batteries because throwing them out felt wasteful, keeping the key to the old shed because what if.

The archaeology of the ordinary

Open it after they are gone and it becomes an archaeology of a life lived at its most ordinary and unguarded. Because every object in there was put there by a hand, in a moment, for a reason — a reason usually so mundane it was never spoken, and is now unrecoverable, and yet the object remains, testifying to a small forgotten instant of a real day. The twist tie saved off a loaf of bread. The receipt kept for a return that was never made. The spare button, still in its tiny bag, from a shirt long gone. The instructions to something, folded, in case. Each is a fossil of an ordinary decision — I might need this — made by someone who assumed a future in which they’d need it, and the drawer is packed to the top with these small deferred usefulnesses, a whole stratum of just in case laid down by a person who is no longer around for the case to arise.

And it is the sheer practicality of it that reaches in and undoes you, more than any keepsake could, because it is so free of sentiment and therefore so completely them. The keepsake was chosen to be looked at, and grief knows what to do with a thing meant to be kept. But the junk drawer was never meant to be looked at, never meant to survive them, never meant to be anything but a functional mess — and so it caught them exactly as they were when they weren’t performing, weren’t remembering, weren’t curating, just living, just tossing the odd screw in the drawer on a Tuesday and shutting it. It is the physical equivalent of the search history, the household’s unguarded interior, the record of a mind at its least self-conscious — and to sort through it is to meet the person in their most ordinary and unwitnessed self, the one who kept the batteries and lost the manuals, hand after hand, deposit after deposit, over a whole life of shutting the drawer and moving on.

The drawer you cannot sort

And this is why the junk drawer defeats people — why it so often is the last thing dealt with, left for months, opened and closed and left again. Because there is no right way to sort it. Everything else can be dealt with by a rule: the clothes to the charity, the papers filed or shredded, the books boxed, the keepsakes kept. But the junk drawer resists every rule, because it is by definition the things that fit no rule, and to sort it you would have to make a hundred tiny impossible judgments — is this key important? does this screw go to something? why did they keep this receipt? — each one a small interrogation of a person who can no longer answer, each object holding a reason that died with them. You cannot throw it all out, because somewhere in there might be something that matters, and you cannot keep it all, because most of it is genuinely junk, and you cannot tell which is which, because the only person who knew is gone. So the drawer sits, unsorted, a small dense core of the unresolvable, the one part of the estate that cannot be settled because it was never, itself, settled.

I have come, honestly, to love the junk drawers of the dead, in the strange way you can love a thing that hurts, because they are the truest portrait a house holds and the least likely to lie. The framed photograph shows you the face they arranged. The junk drawer shows you the life — the thrift and the hope and the disorder and the deferral, the endless small just in case of a person moving through their days assuming there would be more of them. When I finally sort one, I do it slowly, and I do not throw much away, and I keep a few of the least meaningful things — a twist tie, a mystery key, a foreign coin — precisely because they mean nothing, because their meaninglessness is the most honest thing about them, a small piece of a person exactly as they were when no one, including themselves, was paying any attention at all. That, it turns out, is where most of a life is actually lived: not in the curated rooms, but in the drawer nobody meant anyone to see.