January 3, 2021: Boutons Supplementaires

You probably don’t have a junk drawer, or if you do, you have six things in it, or if you have more than six things, you still cleaned it out early in the pandemic, and got it down to a reasonable level. Bravo.

Me, I have junk drawers, junk cabinets, and a junk basket. Something has to give, and with me, it’s de-cluttering. I never want to do it. I get no charge from having done it.

Today, though, my husband asked if I had a tape measure, and I thought it was in the junk basket, and then there was a concert I wanted to listen to, but not watch, exactly, and so I dumped out the junk basket, and went through the contents while the concert happened. I’d have sung in the concert, if this were before, but the few members of my choir still singing (many feet away from each other) are young and professional. We old amateurs are benched until we get vaccinated. Going through the junk basket while I listened might keep me from pining.

Great concert. No tape measure.

But many tiny envelopes of extra buttons! Apparently, every time I bought anything that came with extra buttons, I put the little envelope in that basket, and then forgot it. I never had to replace the buttons, either. The extras were just gravy.

Most were unremarkable, but a few were so special that I could remember what their working sisters had adorned. Oh, that was a nice jacket! And that was a pretty sweater. I got a little bit nostalgic, and I somehow began to find them touching, in that free-floating sentimentality way. Oh, look at all these sad little buttons, some of them like veritable jewels, that never got used, that just passed their existence in tiny envelopes.

Never mind. Clearly, I was having a moment. I I put them all in a Ziploc, and they are headed out the door, either to the crafty Scrap store or to you, if you want a bag of mint condition buttons.

And then there were some tickets from shows I had attended. Oh, shows were fun!

It had been a somewhat emotional day already. I thought I’d gotten to where Republican shenanigans could no longer make me crazy, but I was wrong. The recording of Trump’s call to Raffensperger was pretty horrifying. And Pence agreeing to advance the arguments of the Sedition Gang was sand in my gears.

And then personally, I was thinking about a lovely, staunch old work friend who died on New Year’s. I’d heard about her death from one friend, and even written a condolence card to her husband, which took some of the starch out of me. But then the grapevine got going, and I ended up hearing from other old work friends all day. I even got on a phone call with two of them, inadvertently, because one of us hit that little phone button in Messenger by mistake. It was lovely. Hearing from people I used to work with is always lovely, but I worked in one company for 30 years, so once I start thinking about how I miss those folks, I have a lot of people to miss.

It all combined so that by the time I got down into the basket and discovered some shoe polish, I was pretty tender. I pulled the shoe polish out and thought, Oh, remember shoes? Like, dress-up, leather shoes? Remember wanting to polish them up? Shoes were…I dunno, they weren’t great, but getting dressed up and going somewhere was great. I miss SHOES…. I wore them in CHOIR....

Anyway, that was it for decluttering in 2021! All done now! So glad I got it over with early in the year.