The Busy Drawer

In the white weatherboard house with a blue tin roof  there was a busy drawer.  Do you have a busy drawer?  (When I was a kid it was the top drawer in the kitchen, but in the Castle it's the third drawer from the top and it's full of crap.)  In my childhood busy drawer there were scissors, dead batteries, lots of paperclips, nail clippers, rubber bands, rolls of film waiting to be developed, stamps you could only use at Christmas time and postcards that had fallen off the fridge.  Basically, all the stuff that we didn't really have anywhere else to put.  Sooner or later it went in the busy drawer. 

Most things were just lying around loose, and the lesser used items you had to search for up the back of the drawer, but some things were kept in tins.  A collection of buttons, some foreign coins and the like.  They were in old Strepsils tins.  I don't remember there ever being Strepsils in the tins, so I'm guessing my Dad had kept them for years, just waiting for them to have a purpose.

When I was a kid, if I asked my Dad what a piece of machinery or something was he would almost always answer 'It's a wing-wong for a goose's bridle'.  We didn't have any geese, so I had no idea why we would need a goose's bridle, but I believed him. Don't you always believe your Dad? Even if every April 1st they tell you there is a white kangaroo in the backyard.

My Dad had several sheds full of wing-wongs.  He seemed to know exactly where everything was and kept a lot of things just because he thought one day they might come in  handy.  I only ever had one bike.  I got it when I was about 8, it was blue and had a white basket with plastic flowers on it and streamers hanging out of the handlebars.  When I outgrew that bike I didn't get a new one, my Dad just took the handles off my older brother's long discarded Dragstar bike and put them on it.  Dragstar handles were those long, high bendy ones, remember?  I got a few more years out of the bike without my parents having to spend a cent.  When my parents sold the farm several years ago and moved into town, I thought they got rid of all the wing-wongs.

A couple of weeks ago I was with my sister and we called into my Mum's house but she wasn't home.  I really needed to see what treats she'd been baking use the bathroom and I didn't have my spare key with me.  My sister went into a secret spot in the garden and retrieved a hidden key that apparently everyone in the family except me knows about.  When she handed me the key, a tear ran down my cheek.

It was in a Strepsils tin.

It turns out you really don't know when a goose will need a wing-wong for it's bridle.


This is not a sponsored post, I don't even like Strepsils.