I had a really interesting day the other week, where everything seemed to somehow center around cardboard boxes and how I needed one and did or didn’t have one on hand. It started with getting my kids on the bus, and how my daughter was trying to preserve her science project without first) her brothers ruining it before she got to school, second) anybody else ruining it from either the bus stop or the bus ride on the way to school, or third) acts of God, which is meant by rain, or a car spraying a giant puddle, or the neighbor’s dog feeling strongly attracted to the moving pieces dangling about.
Lucky for the unassuming seven-year-old, Mom had a plan! I had gotten something in the mail the other day, and I went and retrieved the box from the garage. Normally, whenever we get some sort of box, we throw it in the garage to burn for later. However, I’ve started to realize the merit in breaking down and preserving some of them. This is just a fact of life, or what comes from having a family. We always need cardboard boxes!
No sooner had my kids gotten on the bus than I started making a meal I was supposed to deliver to a friend later that night, who’d had surgery. I had attempted to deliver too many meals, and attempted is the key word here. So many times I have thought that the casserole would be fine on the floor of the passenger side, or in the trunk semi-tucked in. Only to have frozen hashbrowns and parmesan cheese spread and sprayed all over my vehicle, which smells bad enough as it is. Of course, I am not blaming this on anyone but myself, and the naive presupposition that gravity somehow operates on merit, and surely it would favor me if I’m trying to do a good deed.
Well, I have since taken a science class, and also begun to wrap the acrobatic dishes in bath towels, and then rest them in cardboard boxes, which I then anchor between roller blades and the jack. Works like a charm. Unless I don’t have any cardboard boxes. Which, on this particular day, I didn’t. Crap. Isn’t it just the worst when you don’t have any cardboard boxes on hand? Let’s just that I won’t be taken by surprise like that again…