A Tisket, A Tasket, Just Not Another Basket!

My wife is the Queen of Storage. I’ll walk out of a room full of items in our tiny house as she sighs, “Where am I gonna put all this stuff?” Moments later I’ll return and everything’s gone.

I have no idea where some of it goes. I leave large vases on the back room counter because there’s just nowhere to put them. I come back later and they’ve disappeared without a trace. I’ll search every cabinet high and low, twice, with no luck. Then I’ll bring home flowers, and Nancy will say, “Oh, yea!” step into the back room, and return seconds later with three large vases in hand.

“Where the heck were those?” I demand.
“In the cabinet,” she says.

Right. The hidden, secret spy false-wall cabinet built by moonshiners during the Prohibition, I suppose. It’s like turning your back on David Copperfield at Ellis Island, then looking back and *poof!* the Statue of Liberty is gone. Then your turn around once more, and it’s back again.

But my wife can do it with everything.
Well, almost everything.

There is one item she hasn’t conquered, one trick she has yet to master. The ultimate disappearing trick of them all: the Mystery of the Vanishing Wicker Baskets.

If you have even one, you can imagine. If you have several, you know my pain:

They can’t go on the shelf cuz they’re just too tall.
They can’t go in the cabinet cuz they’re wider than the wall.
Forget about the closet cuz the door won’t close.
Can’t hang them from the ceiling cuz they’ll smack you in the nose.

And you can’t get rid of any of them, because this one was expensive, and that one was a gift, and we actually used the brown one once about six years ago.

“Just put them in the garage,” comes the voice of wisdom.

Ah, yes, the Room of Impossibly Shaped Items, where the lawn mower and the bikes and the 16-foot tall, 200-pound patio umbrella all dwell in lonely, motionless silence.

But not the baskets. Their shapes and sizes (and handles!) refuse to cooperate. The first three let you stack them easily on the ledge, so that when you push your luck and set the fourth one on top, they can all leap off and bounce around to the ground together. You’re sure you hear them whisper, “Yee-haw!” and “Kowabunga!” and “Aim for his nose!”

So if anyone can get me in touch with David Copperfield, I’ll send you a gift basket.