My Drawer of 41 Orphaned Lids Is Not Clutter. It Is a Reunification Program.

Every week, somewhere in this country, a person opens a kitchen drawer, holds up a plastic lid with no container beneath it, and drops it in the bin. We have a word for leaving a dependent without support. I will not soften it here.

That is why I keep 41 lids in the second drawer to the left of my sink. Visitors call it clutter. I call it a reunification program, and I am proud of our record.¹

The problem, I have come to accept, is supply. A lid cannot be reunited with a container that does not exist. So this autumn I began buying new containers. They are not for storing food. They are homes for the lids. A lid is not a guest. It is family, and family does not wait in a drawer.²

This raised the question of what to put in the containers, and I have answered it responsibly. I no longer cook any meal that will not fit beneath a lid I already own. Lasagna has been retired. Soup survives only in the quantity permitted by the round blue lid, roughly a cup and a third. Last Sunday I made a single meatball for the square lid with the cracked corner, because it was its turn.³

Policy requires infrastructure. I have since redesigned my kitchen around the lids. The spice rack is now a lid rack. The cabinet above the refrigerator holds the large rectangular lids, arranged by likely decade of separation. I removed the microwave, which had no lid and had never once tried to get one.

My sister, Ruth Hedges, 52, of Duluth, Minnesota, has questioned these decisions. "That drawer is a museum, Clement. Museums don't reunite anybody," she said. She is entitled to her view, and I have filed it in the drawer.⁴

In fairness, Tuesday's weather was offered a right of reply. It was overcast with a chance of afternoon showers, and I have recorded this as no comment.

The work continues. Last week a contractor measured the kitchen and confirmed it is, in every structural respect, a container. It is missing only a lid. I have begun the search.⁵

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¹ No lid has ever been matched.

² None of the 23 containers bought since September fits any lid in the drawer. Each arrived with its own lid, and those lids now also live in the drawer. The program currently serves 64 lids.

³ Several lids in the program belong to containers I put in the recycling between 2014 and 2017.

⁴ One of the lids is a frisbee.

⁵ The contractor has asked me to clarify that this is the ceiling.