It just hit me that my parents keep a glass jar full of soap next to the bathroom trash can. I've walked past it for years. I've stubbed my toe on it. But it just registered that it is the soap equivalent of a spare change jar, only more useless.
Every time we'd empty one of those big jugs of Softsoap, we'd trun it upside down on top of this spare soap jar and let the last few drops drip out. Over the past 15 years, we've saved--wait for it--alomst a half a gallon of soap! A buck-seventy-five! And we never have used this soap, either. In the process we've stubbed our toes countless times, wasted probably what amounts to an hour just trying to get the one bottle to balance on top of the other, and managed to totally forget about what this little redneck modern-art sculpture was originally for. Maybe we're saving it for the apocalypse, or when the store is sold out of soap. Yeah, right. You spend three decades dead broke poor, though, and I guess old habits die hard.
I got to thinking, what is this even here for? Nobody could tell me. It just seemed like a good idea to keep doing. Why are we keeping this? If we got rid of it we'd have a lot more space.
So of course I emptied the trash and turned another bottle upside down on the jar.
Gotta be good for something, right?
1 comment:
I knew a woman who's mother would keep the last little sliver of bar soap in jars in her cupboards and when she died her daughter found 40 jars full of soap slivers.
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