Begging for Boxes

We have a tag sale on Saturday, and of course the weatherman is tossing around predictions of four straight days of rain beginning guess when.

Still, this isn’t my first rodeo, so I’ve started collecting boxes to encourage any buyers worried about how they’ll transport their loot.

When I was a child, before today’s ubiquitous plastic bins, my mother’s packing advice was always the liquor store. Yes, sorting and packing our belongings can often drive all of us there, but her suggestion was all about the boxes to be found there. 

I grew up in a family with a lot of books. We spent summers at my grandparents in Tulsa and books were everywhere, likely due in large part to the fact that my Uncle Sam had spent so much time at home with polio as a child. I remember the thrill of opening the storage closet in his bedroom and finding an entire set of Pogo, and I read Andersonville and Gone With The Wind at 10 or 11.

We had bookcases full at home, too, and my mother always advised that if you had to move books, liquor store boxes were the way to go since they were usually sturdier than those namby pamby grocery store ones.

I had a small setback when I drove to my usual source. They always had a haphazard wall of cardboard piled up at the front, but instead I found an empty store. However, turned out they’d been bought out by a larger chain and so I drove a bit farther to find a shiny new liquor store, so clean that I despaired of finding what I needed, what with the twenty-foot expanse of gleaming floor before you reached the bottles of wine.

 I’d been hoping for a quick in and out, having left Mamie in the car, and wondered if I’d be forced to buy something before they’d relinquish what I really wanted. But a manager, probably as new and shiny as his floor, directed me to a tasteful stack of maybe fifteen boxes neatly stacked in a corner.

We all won. He reduced his pile, I came away with arms full of cardboard, and Mamie re-learned for the umpteenth time that she wasn’t being abandoned forever.