Boxes

Listen, I have about a million things I need to do before I move to Boston in—oh my Lord—four days, so let’s make this snappy, okay?

You should know how these posts go by now. I’ll give you a rough outline and you can fill in the rest in your imagination. Let’s see . . .

My apartment is full of boxes. They are made of cardboard. Which I guess will have to be this week’s springboard to a humorous yet poignant anecdote from my childhood. I’m just typing my thoughts here but maybe I could tell you about the time my paternal grandma and I did a rainy-day crafting activity involving a flattened cardboard box and a sheet of paper that had a house printed on it? Sure, why not, I’ll tell that one. 

I had to color the house on the paper using crayons and then we pasted the sheet onto the cardboard and cut the backing to match the shape of the house, poking out openings for the windows and a little flap for the front door and why is this taking so long to describe? The point is we glued paper to cardboard for fun, presumably because my grandma lived through the Great Depression and the frugal practices of those years stayed with her. Maybe that also explains why sometimes when my family took her to a restaurant she’d wrap up any uneaten bread in a napkin and put it in her purse. What a humorous yet poignant thing to do.

Circling back around to the ostensible subject of the post, now might be a good time to describe other, more recent experiences I’ve had with cardboard boxes. You know: previous moving days, Amazon deliveries, pizza deliveries, that sort of thing. Boy did I pick a dull topic. Thank goodness I’m bailing soon. 

All that’s left to do is gather up all these disparate strands—cardboard, moving, the Great Depression, my grandma—in a way that gives the reader the sense that a resolution has been reached. I feel like you could mention The Grapes of Wrath, what with the Joads migrating from the Dust Bowl and everything. Sure, the Joads were Okies and my grandma was an Arkie, but you could smooth that over. 

I say you could do these things because, as I told you at the start, I simply don’t have the time.

Let me know how it all turns out!