Health & Fitness
The World According to Janie G.: My Tupperware Closet
Ok,I know you're out there. There must be at least four houses on every block with this same problem going on in their kitchen.
I have a dirty little secret lurking inside my kitchen.
Only my immediate family knows about it, but you’ve heard that expression, "Confession is good for the soul?"
Okay, here goes, it's my Tupperware closet. From the outside it looks harmless enough, just like any other cabinet in the kitchen. But if you are brave enough to open the door, the contents could wreak havoc on you for hours to come.
My mother Rosetta was victim to it the longest. Whenever she would come to our house for dinner, as we would be cleaning up I would say in an extremely pathetic voice, "Mom, please straighten out the Tupperware closet for me, please." Usually, she succumbed to my pleas. It served a two-fold purpose: the closet would get straightened out and she would also be able to retrieve the containers that were hers that I failed to return. Mom would say to my son, “Brian, please get me the laundry basket,” and she would empty the entire contents of the closet out into the basket and start from scratch, arranging covers and bottoms.
Sad to say, that would last just a few days and then it was back to business as usual. If you were brave enough to open the door, everything would fall out all over the floor. It got to the point that when my mother would come over, and we would clean up after dinner, she would say in an extremely stern voice — the one I would recognize that she use to use when she would chase me around the kitchen table back in my younger days — “Don’t ask, I’m not going to do it. I’ll just use Ziplock bags. I’ll bring my own from now on if you don’t have any.” No one would go near the Tupperware closet.
Recently, my husband and I were babysitting for our two grandchildren at our son’s house for a few days while he and his wife were away celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary. I was going to make pasta for dinner so I was familiarizing myself with their kitchen and was looking for a colander to drain the pasta. I opened up one of the cabinets and low and behold, it was a Tupperware closet, almost like mine. I quickly closed it. I called my husband Steve over and said, “Look,” and I slowly opened the door, careful not to open it all the way for fear everything would come tumbling out. He quickly slammed the door shut and said with a big grin on his face, "Kris (our daughter-in-law) is not even blood related to you.”
He then called our grandchildren up from the playroom and told them to get their jackets on. I asked him where we were going and he said, “To Bed Bath and Beyond to buy a colander.”
At the last family gathering at our house for dinner, when it came time to clean up — and needing containers to store the leftovers in because I had exhausted all of my resources, including my mother and sister — I turned to my 14-year-old niece and said “Sweetie, would you please straighten out the Tupperware closet for Auntie?” She looked at me with a perfectly straight face and asked, "If I do, can that count as community service?” Community service? Go figure.
