Zelda the cat is answering the call of the wild tonight. But thank goodness it’s not because she’s looking for love.

The spay job is done. We are rescued from the on-again, off-again caterwauling love songs of the past two months. 

She’s making better use of her time by sharpening her claws on her cardboard scratcher. 

Youngest Daughter makes an observation: “Mom, it doesn’t make sense that cardboard would do a good job of sharpening her claws.”

We research: a cat’s claws are made in layers, and friction against a softer surface does a much better job of removing the outer layer. The “softer” surface, such as cardboard, rope, or carpet, still feels rough to us, but to a cat, it’s exactly what’s needed to peel back the old and make space for the new.

So cats are not just clawing up the carpet or the door trim or your favorite sweater to test the limits of your love. The clawing has a purpose: if they don’t use their claws, they become useless.

It is the same with our minds, our talents, our bodies. 

I worked out like my old self this week, but it was the first time in the almost ten weeks now since my surgery. I’ve got about as much strength as a cooked spaghetti noodle.

Use it or lose it.

One thing I especially hate to lose is good food, especially home-canned vegetables. 

Note: my family and I are canners, though not as diehard as we used to be. I can guarantee you, if we looked hard enough, one of us could find a quart Mason jar of green beans from 1993 in a pantry. 

It always breaks my heart to throw away those old canned goods. Take the green beans: it’s work to grow them, pick them, and snap them. Canning is hot and heavy work, and we can only process seven quarts at a time in the old yellow canner. Though I’ve not actually measured the time, it feels like it takes 246 days, ten hours, and 23 minutes to can one quart of green beans.

So popping the lid and dumping the aged, darkened contents is like throwing away all that time, but I’m not about to use a can from the summer before my senior year of high school. 

However, if World War III ever happens, just know, the seals are still good. My bunch would most likely be eating green beans.

We are also savers, packrats, and mild hoarders, so we can usually find whatever we need around our places to get a job done. We find uses for things that others would have long since trashed or sent to the thrift store. 

Any time there is a “decades” dress-up day at school and one of the kids needs an outfit, my mother will come through every time. There’s enough polyester in a storage closet to stock one of Elvis’s Las Vegas shows.

We could probably start an office supply store with the pens, pencils, envelopes, and papers crammed in drawers and stacked in various corners of our dwellings.

And our junk drawers? They’re like glorious surprise grab bags with the most random items: batteries, magnets, old packs of Big Red chewing gum, fishing line, bookmarks, loose change, straight pins, notepads, and school day pictures from 1983, with names and dates written on the back in neat script.

If your house doesn’t have at least one junk drawer, I don’t want to visit. There’s something satisfying about visiting a kitchen, pulling out the drawers looking for the silverware, and stumbling across a hidden stash of random objects that don’t have a proper place.

It is a calming thought: yes, these people are just like me.

Maybe we could all use our things a little better, but in case there’s an emergency, we’re covered.

Case in point: the toilet paper is out at my house, except while cleaning the bathroom I found a few rolls stuck in the recesses of the cabinet.

I am saved: it’s the leftovers from the yard-rolling clean-up of last October. One roll was partially used and flattened and appeared to have some light damage. There was a hint of dirt on the edges.

I think I’ll use it.

If only our minds, our talents, and our bodies could sit around and be ready to go at a moment’s notice, the same way it is with our stuff.

Maybe we all need to do like Zelda and get a cardboard scratcher. You gotta start somewhere, but your weights, or your books, or your crafts, or your music, or your goals, or your dreams won’t do any good propped in the corner hidden by a stack of unfolded clothes.

You better get busy, and you better use it.

And fold those clothes too.

But leave the junk drawer alone.