The basket

My Father’s Day gift was a basket full of nuts. All kinds of nuts. Mixed nuts, honey-roasted cashews, chocolate-covered pecans, butternut peanuts, and even dark-chocolate espresso beans.

I am spoiled.

What happens to the container after what it held is gone?

For me, it was a basket divided into small compartments. When the last of the nuts had disappeared, my wife asked what I thought we should do with it. I didn’t have any ideas worth offering.

While I was outside doing some necessary yard work, the basket quietly found another purpose.

When I came back in, it had been placed inside our junk drawer. Every battery we owned had found its own compartment. AA, AAA, C, D, nine-volt—they were no longer rolling around together, hidden beneath rubber bands, pens, and whatever else gathers in a drawer like that.

I hadn’t thought of using the basket to organize anything. To me, it had simply been a way to carry nuts.

My wife saw something more. She paid attention not to what the basket had been holding, but to what it might hold next.

The batteries have now found a home.

The basket has found its home.

And both have become part of a drawer we call the junk drawer only because we have never found a better name for it.

Perhaps every home needs someone who notices not only what things are, but what they might still become.

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