Magic Drawer

Every now and then, the Mild Wife and I like to have food delivered to the Mild Home. It's not a very frequent occurrence, but every now and then, we decide to order something instead of cooking. That's how, and why, I embarked on a quest to become a topping whisperer, for example (long story short, I have resolved to find new pizza topping combinations that taste good).

Now, this post isn't so much about the actual as it is about something else that usually comes with the order. Basically, whenever you order food from a restaurant, they usually include napkins in the bag.

For some reason, we almost never use those napkins with the meal that is provided. I think part of it is that we usually put the food on a plate of some sort, so we end up setting down our usual place setting with the food. After all, it's still a meal, it was just cooked by someone else. So, we end up using our own napkins, and we usually just stash the to-go napkins in a drawer.

Recently, however, the Mild Wife noticed that the to-go napkin stash was starting to grow, so she remarked that we should use them up. Okay, not a problem. A napkin is a napkin for the most part, so I just started grabbing napkins out of the drawer instead of the usual spot from the kitchen counter. It made a for a few meals where the napkins started to look a bit random, but since I knew how that happened, I didn't think much of it.

After a couple of weeks, though, I noticed that the napkin stash was lasting a surprisingly long time. I hadn't thought much of it for the first few days since it was a stash that we'd accumulated over a couple of years (like I said, we don't really order out that often), and I figured it'd take us a week or so to work our way through it. Still, the stash looked surprisingly full even after a couple of weeks.

Eventually, I commented on this out loud, telling the Mild Wife that there were a lot more take-out napkins than I had expected. In fact, I believe I said something like, "where the heck are all these napkins coming from?"

That led to a bout of laughter from the Mild Wife.

You see, since we'd resolved to work our way through our napkin "stash," the Mild Wife had also included the napkins we'd bought for last year's Friendsgiving in said stash. I had not realized it, but the Mild Wife had refilled the drawer with napkins from the Friendsgiving napkins periodically. That also explained why the "take-out napkins" were of a surprisingly good quality. So, I thought we were still using up take-out napkins, but we were actually working through our leftover napkins from a party we'd had. And since we'd made sure to get those napkins in bulk (we didn't want to run out), we had a lot of leftover napkins.

Once she explained what had actually been happening, I started cracking up, too. We did not, in have, have an exceedingly large napkin supply. I was, however, *that* close to thinking we had a magic drawer that refilled itself; it immediately reminded me of a magic laundry basket that washes all the clothes on its own. Magic, indeed.