Souvenir Note:
Kondo No-No
25 October 2018
¶ There are still a few items on the dining table still haven’t found a place since I removed them from the linen closet. Two that I did manage to clear off were plastic containers of the kind that I hate, because with their snap lids &c they take up much more room than their contents merit.
One of these containers is the size of a shoebox. Inside was a smaller box, with no lid, containing a collection of shoe-polishing equipment. We don’t polish our shoes anymore. But you never know. So I took out the smaller box and returned it to the linen closet, where it didn’t take up much room.
The other container, somewhere between the size of a pencil case and a shoebox, contained fragments that any sane person would throw away. A piece or two of inlay from a folding screen that Ray Soleil took years to talk me out of having restored. (He carted it off to charity.) A couple of green glass leaves and rose glass petals that fell off an extravagant piece of decorola that my mother picked up somewhere, an Italian bouquet of something, about a cubic foot in size — Kathleen put up with it for years before we agreed that it was unsalvageably duty — and a pair of miniature Japanese clogs that belong to a geisha bunny doll that sits among pillows on a sofa in the living room.
I found a nice place for all of these bits, a lidded wicker basket for which my grandson makes a beeline whenever he visits, because it contains a whirly flashing light thing that I can’t even describe.