Top Drawer

    Yesterday when my husband was out hunting, I was in the bedroom hunting through my dresser drawers.  Our bedroom furniture came with small, velvet lined top drawers.  I'm not sure what purpose they were intended for but, in our case, they function as sieves which skim the flotsam that rises to the top of the other drawers.  In other words they are green velvet lined junk drawers. Despite all the years I have spent years building a tolerance for disorder (drawer rhymes with ignore, not a coincidence), I was overcome by an urge to "straighten things up" while searching through the top drawer of my nightstand.  In minutes, I had thrown out a handful of things and organized the rest into usefulness.  I was so inspired I even vacuumed the linty detritus with small, battery powered vacuum made to clean crumbs off the tablecloth that I bought because it was shaped like a lamb.  I moved from there to my top left dresser drawer where I store freebees my husband gets from sales reps, an assortment of reading glasses, points club membership cards, etc.
     That left only the top right drawer to be transformed, the card drawer.  I make my own cards (computer program, not craft), so at the beginning of each month, I make all the cards I will need and store them in that drawer.  The other cards in the drawer are special ones that I have received.  I enjoy making, sending and receiving cards but, I am not particularly sentimental, after a decent viewing period I throw them away.  But there are a handful special enough to keep close at hand, the kind I like to go back and reread.  I have nearly every card Reed has ever given me stored away in the basement.  Most of the ones tucked in the dresser are from my sons, scraps of spartan sentimentality a mother so longs to receive, especially when the relationship road has been rocky.  Tracy went through a difficult period when he turned 14.  Will's difficult period was from ages 2 to 17.  Those cards and notes make those "muddle" ages worthwhile.  My daughter loves me too, but she expresses it by remodeling our house and that is really hard to fit in a drawer. 
     I reread each card, discarding none, and stacked them neatly in the top right drawer, the green velvet lined drawer where I keep love.