There’s a cabinet under my kitchen counter that’s full of empty glass jars.
Mason jars. Pickle jars. Pasta sauce jars with the labels half-peeled off.
I have at least thirty of them.
I’ve used maybe four in the last decade.
(Three for buttons. One to bring soup to a sick neighbor.)
But I keep them.
What if I make jam someday?
What if I start canning?
What if a friend needs a vase in a pinch?
That’s the thing about “just in case” clutter.
It isn’t really about the items.
It’s about a small fear in the back of your brain that says: what if you need this and don’t have it?
My mother kept jars too.
She washed every pasta sauce jar and lined them up on a basement shelf.
She grew up during the war years. Her mother grew up during the Depression.
To them, throwing away a perfectly good glass jar wasn’t just wasteful. It was reckless.
I inherited that thinking from them. Without ever knowing I had.
And once I started seeing it, I realized something.
The jars were just the beginning.
“Just in case” was hiding in every drawer, every closet, every corner of my house.