LEFTOVERS & LIDS

My mom's refrigerator is always jam packed.  I mean, it's crammed to the brim with this and that, bits of former meals, celery wrapped in tin foil (she swears it keeps it fresh), brown twinged cabbage (she shaves the brown off and keeps using it), containers of stuff that she will rework into something from some recipe she clipped from the plethora of magazines she subscribes to.  She tends to keep things that I would never save, or maybe even cook to start with.  Before I make it sound like you would get food poisoning if you ate at her house, she is a good cook.  She uses most every scrap of everything to make something.  Always is she cooking, trying a new recipe, making something to take to someone who has had surgery, a baby, a toothache or says they love "this or that delicacy" of hers.  I'm not a saver by nature.  She is.  On any given day you can find stacks of Cool-Whip bowls, old butter tubs, yogurt containers and ice cream tubs filling her cupboards.  She uses them to give food away she makes to family and friends thereby foregoing having to bother with getting the containers back.  She was a plastic recycler long before it was trendy.  Gladware beware, Caroline is already there!!  Plasticware for leftovers leads me to mom's lid drawer.  If her refrigerator is cram packed, what do you think her lid drawer looks like:)  Having lived with my parents for a short stint when I moved back, I found myself alone in the house one winter day after they had gone to Florida for the winter.  I made dinner that night and then looked for, you guessed it - a plastic container to put the remaining food in.  After securing the correct size of plasticware to match the amount of food, I turned toward the lid drawer.  In my head I could hear old west salon music play like when the villain would swing open the salon doors.  The terror of the lid drawer lay in front of me.  I pulled on the drawer but it was so full of lids that I couldn't get it open all the way.  A lid was wedged somewhere on the top of the stack and was impeding the full opening of the drawer.  My disgust over this blasted lid drawer increased.  I yanked on the drawer harder and harder until the lid gave way and the sea of lids which lay willy nilly with no rhyme or reason, stared at me.  How would I find the right corresponding lid to match this container!!  I sat on the floor in front of the drawer and began rifling through them, eyeballing sizes and colors that I thought might fit.  It was like searching for a toothpick in a pile of sawdust.  I personally own very few leftover containers and never save a Cool Whip bowl (I don't buy it) or a margarine, yogurt, sour cream or cream cheese container - ever.  I had my fill of my mom's lid drawer, the disorganization and my inability to find the appropriate matching lid to the container that now held my leftovers.  Plastic rage filled me and I began throwing lids across the kitchen floor.  No thought in my head to look any more for the right lid, but only to rid my soul of plastic rage at my mom's lid drawer that I had since I was a child.  Before I knew it, I had thrown every last lid across the kitchen floor as I repeated a trifecta rosary of swear words.   The drawer now completely empty, and my anger ejected from within, I sat and laughed at the relative new mess of disorganization I had created.  Rearranging a larger drawer to house the lids, I moved them to a "deluxe" suite where they were now free to sit in a more expanded space while still taunting, daring me to find the right one amidst the droves of plastic.  I confessed to my mom upon her return in the Spring and her question as to why the lids were moved to a different drawer, "Plastic rage rose up in me and your lids found their way across the floor before finding their way to a bigger space!"  Who needs that many lids anyway?