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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
yeah, baby, you know what I want.
(Legal wrangling continues.)
This move has changed me in ways that I never envisioned. Not only is my body now accustomed to lugging heavy things around and being in near-constant motion, not only do I avoid buying or permitting my children to buy anything that I can't eat or throw away lest I should have to (scary chord) move it, but I have discovered in myself an insatiable lust for... boxes.
My maternal grandmother has a wall in her kitchen that is one big bulletin board, and in the way of ladies who lived through the Depression and collected ev-er-y-thing, it is always covered with interesting objects. Interesting, at least, the first time you look, because the turnover on this wall art is zero. Every now and then something is added, but nothing ever gets taken away; I remember seeing some dooey-buttons from a 1960's presidential election way down in one corner and thinking that it was neat that Grandma had found those and put them there, and it wasn't until years later that I realized that she had probably put them there when they were current.
I digress (no, really?). One of the items on Grandma's bulletin board that, in my hyperlexic restlessness, I read and re-read when my family lived with her for five years, was a column by Erma Bombeck about her mother's fixation with boxes, and how she would never let one go once she had it, and how Erma and the rest of the family "received gifts in boxes from stores that had gone out of business twenty years ago" or some such thing, and how Erma's mother had to know a young man brought home by one of her daughters was worthy of her box before she would give it to him. This was another mere bit of (very funny) quaintness to me, any time I thought about it, until this past month.
But now... now the smell of cardboard in the sunshine makes me get all happy inside. I get a little tingly feeling when I hear the sound of the tape screeching out to make this flat bit of cardboard into a lovely prism-shaped container that will carry my belongings. I have a favorite box (U-Haul "Small Box" size, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...). I never had a favorite box before. Honestly, I never thought about boxes at all, until every single moment of every day of my life became consumed with the need to put more and more and more things in boxes, moving to and fro and taping and marking like a robot on speed, until my house becomes empty. Yesterday I ran out. It was a terrible moment. I had ONE very large box on the porch, and a whole slew of shoebox-and-smaller sizes, but nothing in which I could pack our clothing, which was the task of the day. I had a leeetle meltdown (I cannot pack! How can I PACK when I don't have BOXES? What am I supposed to DO HERE?) blew up at my husband on the phone (after all, if a man can't provide you with the boxes to which you have been accustomed...), complained to my mother, and before I knew it God was having a good laugh at me and I was very nearly buried in boxes. I went to grocery stores and collected some (at T's urging -- I so thought grocery stores must have stopped getting things in boxes sometime around the Summer of Love, but then what else would they get things in?); my mother brought a pile of them from work; T came home with about a hundred pounds of very large ones from the warehouse at work. Then this morning my dad rescued some for me at the hardware store, and just as I was sitting down to blog about boxes, Debi arrived with another heap of them. I am set.
With God as my witness, I will never go boxless again.
Comments
That is what Sister-in-laws are for, yes???? =)
Posted by: debi at September 11, 2007 07:57 PM
Living in Europe I've been amazed to find just how many things are done differently. This was really brought home to me when I got moved at work, from one office to another one across the hall. Just as in a US office move, they brought us a bunch of boxes to pack our stuff in and left them in the hall, collapsed flat and waiting for us to assemble them. When I went to do so, I found that Dutch boxes put together entirely differently from American boxes - in a reasonable and logical way, just a completely different reasonable and logical way. Before that, I's have thought there were only a very limited number of ways to assumble a box, but apparently the universe does contain more things than are dreamt of in my philosophy.
Posted by: dichroic at September 11, 2007 11:43 PM
Oh, I have an attic full of boxes. (Well, and other stuff.) I think my true appreciation for boxes began when I worked on the inventory processing team for a bookstore. I also learned how to properly stack a pallet of boxes. So much fun.
Posted by: Kat with a K at September 12, 2007 06:48 AM
HAHAHAHAHA!
Posted by: Anonymous at September 15, 2007 09:58 PM
