"When I grow up, I'm not even going to have a junk drawer," I told my mother many years ago.
She had assigned me the odious job of cleaning out the clutter that accumulated in the bin beneath the breadboard, and I was up to my elbows in unidentified screws, nibbled pencil stubs, and many other odds and ends of questionable origins and worth.
"Yes, you will," Mom answered with the same mildness she used to address my baby brother when she saw the humor in his refusal to take a bath.
I didn't see any point in continuing the verbal debate just then, when I could go ahead and show her someday. But I did take the opportunity to orchestrate great disdain for the task at hand by loudly clunking a toothless comb and three rusty Mason jar rings into the kitchen garbage pail.
When Mother didn't seem to notice, I repeated the performance with a long forgotten pair of stove bolts and a splayed toothbrush of debatable ownership.
What's the matter with Sharon?" my younger sister smirked.
"Nothing that ten or so years and a houseful of kids won't cure!" My mother replied, closing the discussion by turning on the vacuum.
I can still hear that vacuum today sometimes, when I move through the house I now share with my husband and six little "pack rats."
"Yes, you will; yes, you will; yes, you will," it seems to hum, as my modern Hoover inhales crumbs and petrified apple cores from the bottom of a newly emptied kitchen drawer.
"Mother, where are we going to put all this junk?" my ten-year-old daughter asks, holding up a decapitated Barbie doll, with the kind of body language usually reserved for addressing dead mice.
"In the oven," I answer.
"The oven?'
"Yes, but only for a few hours. Your..."
"Grandma is coming over for a visit," my daughter reads my mind.
