The day before they were scheduled to leave France for the States, my homeowners squired me around this huge house, showing me its needs and idiosyncrasies.  The Mrs. deemed it necessary for me to peer into each and every drawer, and of drawers there were many. And it wasn't as if the drawers contained vital things, or were paradigms of exquisite organization--each and every drawer was a clutter of old bills, pencil tips, candle ends, and ancient road maps.

And the joke here is not that I learned nothing from this tour, or that my hostess' lingering lovingly over some contents--as if by touching grocery receipts from 1999 she would be transported to a finer time--was mildly comical. No, the joke was on me. There are six chests with an average of ten drawers each lining the living room walls alone. The man of the house was in the Foreign Service, and the family lived all around the world, mostly in Japan, Italy and France. So there are Japanese chests that unfold like origami puzzles and gargantuan Korean pieces that reminded me of the bamboo magic boxes we had as kids--open a door one way and there are six drawers behind it; open it another and there is a flat surface.

Into the maws we stared together, the Mrs. and I, as we circled the room, one chest at a time. She griped that he wouldn't let her throw anything out, that she was an avid thrower-outer. But, from what I could tell, by the way she caressed empty boxes and an old pile of electric bills from Arlington, VA, from the 1970's, she had her own bent for acquisitiveness.

The highlight, for me, came when at last we'd transited the full orbit of the room and come to rest at "her drawer," a sacred place entirely her own, untrammeled by her husband's un-tossable clutter. She dipped her hands in as if into the Fountain of Youth, resting them inside for a moment, perhaps to absorb a mysterious emulsion of time and space and physicality.

And then she lifted into the light an objet trouve, a small plastic calculator from CVS. Sighing deeply, in part from the toll the circumnavigation of the room had taken on her ample, red-wine-marinated frame, and in part from sincere resignation, she leaned on the chest of drawers and proclaimed, "This has been a great disappointment to us." She went on to explain how the tiny device was solar-operated, yet only worked in the sun. I nodded solemnly and assumed a consoling expression to show her I shared her regret.

Now that the Mrs. and Mr. are gone, I think of that calculator, resting there in the dark, in the 226th drawer in this room where I sit in an ancient house in France. It does not disappoint me, and it is not my place to throw it out. It may yet work someday, when taken into the light.