One Thing Or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – The Drawer of Things We’ll Never Throw Away

By Mark McNease

Every home has one, and ours has several. Not the junk drawer. That’s different. The junk drawer is innocent, cluttered through no fault of its own. It has batteries, rubber bands, expired coupons, a screwdriver that doesn’t belong anywhere else. Maybe a hammer for no discernable reason. That drawer has plausible deniability.

I’m talking about the other drawer. The drawer of things we’ll never throw away.

It might be in a desk. Or a bedroom dresser. Or tucked into a cabinet no one opens unless they’re looking for something specific and end up standing there longer than they intended. You don’t organize this drawer. You visit it.

Inside mine

A program from a musical I don’t remember seeing.
A couple of old photos that never made it into my scrapbook.
Several keys of mysterious origin and purpose.
A napkin from a restaurant I’ve never been back to.
Loose match sticks.

None of it is valuable, yet all of it seems priceless.

At this age  you start to realize that objects are really just anchors. They hold down moments so they don’t drift entirely away. We tell ourselves we’re keeping the thing. What we’re really keeping is the proof.

Proof that someone was here.
Proof that we were loved.
Proof that something mattered.

It’s funny how ruthless we become about other belongings as we age. We purge clothes. We donate books. We look at furniture and think, “Do I really need this?” There’s a certain freedom in lightening the load. Fewer years ahead does that. You start asking what you actually want to carry.

But the drawer? The drawer stays.

Because those things aren’t clutter. They’re witnesses.

Every once in a while, I open ours. Not to clean it out, but to check in. I’ll pick something up and hold it for a minute. It’s like dialing an old number and hearing a familiar voice in your head. The body may have changed. The address may have changed. The people may have left the building permanently. But there it is. Evidence.

The absurdity is this: we live in a culture obsessed with decluttering. Minimalism. Clean surfaces. Pristine spaces. As if peace comes from empty shelves and counter tops.

Maybe for some people it does.

For me, peace sometimes comes from knowing that tucked away in a quiet drawer are the small, stubborn artifacts of a life fully lived. Not curated. Not optimized. Just lived.

And here’s the thing, someday someone else may open that drawer. What they’re doing in our house is another story, but they’ll hold those same objects and wonder. They may not know where these things came from. They may not feel the weight of them the way I do. But they’ll know one thing for sure:

Someone was here.

Someone loved.
Someone lost.
Someone kept the evidence.

We don’t keep those things because we’re sentimental. We keep them because we’re human. And at a certain point in life, you understand that being human — messy, attached, unable to let go of a key to nowhere — is not a flaw.

It’s the whole point.