Cardboard boxes are such a huge part of our lives.  It may sound like I am giving them too much credit, but I don’t think that I am.  If you were to take a walk around your house, you would probably discover so many more cardboard boxes than you thought you had, in a lot stranger places than you thought they would be.  And there are probably some en route with the postman, heading to your door as we speak.

My mother used to break down every single box she came across, and kept them in a ginormous stockpile under her stairs.  She had so many cardboard boxes we basically packed our whole house from them, ranging anywhere from a ring box to a washing machine box.

However, there are a lot of fun projects you can do with them, instead of wasting them or stockpiling them.  Below, I have listed three:

• Despite all of the obvious things you can do with cardboard boxes, one of my favorite remains painting with marbles. I first saw this done at a group home for people with special needs, and it really is a project for everyone.  Take the lid off a carton, or cut off the sides of a box so that there is only a couple inches up from the bottom, and squeeze different colors of paint randomly across the bottom.  Throw in a couple marbles and have the artist tip the box from side to side.  The marble will roll through the paint and make a fun design.
• Check this out: make a few notches at the top of a box, a few inches wide, and then set the box on the floor upside down, so that the notches become little doorways. Grab some golf balls and whatever you want to use as a golf club and you’ve got some putt-putt on your hands!
• And then, of course, you have your homemade dollhouse, where you glue a bunch of different sized boxes together to make rooms of different sizes, and you can decorate the walls with wrapping paper to look like wallpaper, and cut out pictures from magazines to use as the accessories and/or backdrop. If you don’t want to do something as girly as a dollhouse, why not put together a firehouse, or even some imaginary world of your own design?  The possibilities are literally endless.

Random Fact of the Day: Did you know that a flock of crows is called a murder?  It is speculated over why this is what they are called, and a lot of the speculation revolves around the superstition surrounding this particular species.  But an interesting observation pointed out that there was a time when groups of animals were given creative names, like a parliament of owls, a knot of frogs, and an ostentation of peacocks.

On a completely different note, when it is time to relocate, we all like to think that we want cheap moving boxes.  The problem with this is that we don’t actually take the time to stop and think about what it really means.  I mean, seriously, would you really choose cheap moving boxes to protect and transfer all of your worldly possessions?  All of your grandmother’s antique crystal serving bowls, or your entire collection of records by The Who, or even your books?  Imagine having the bottom fall out while holding any of the priceless items I just mentioned.  You would probably curse yourself for not going the extra mile.  Because what’s the point of even moving your stuff if you are just going to ruin it along the way, anyway?

A friend once asked for some help moving.  Imagine our absolute surprise and consternation when we arrived and discovered that she was only “mostly” packed.  Now, when most of us think of “packed” we think of items being placed in a container of some sort and being adequately secured.  Well, when this friend said “packed” she really meant that she had unplugged her lamps and set them by the door and was ready to give orders from there.  I kind of feel a little bad for her, actually, because I think she was hoping that it would wind up being some kind of party, and it was nothing of the sort.  She wound up having some pretty adequate help, but we were all people that wanted to get in and get the job done.  I think five of the six of us were prior military, and we were not impressed with either her strategy or her mindset.  I don’t care how cheap, I would have settled for some cheap moving boxes on that day.  It would have beat carrying grocery bags of cat supplies and armfuls of towels.

If there is a moral to the story of “cheap moving boxes” than it has to do with how it’s better to be packed than unpacked, and I think we can all agree on that.

Some of my friends and I decided to start a little outreach when we were sophomore’s in college, and we were able to keep it running through the rest of our time at the school and even hand it down to others when it was time for us to leave.  I hear that it is still running smoothly, and has even expanded to surrounding campuses.  We called it “Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops”.  It was a very simple idea that started with people dropping off small cardboard shipping boxes at a certain spot on campus.  We advertised that we would get donations from local businesses to fill the boxes with and then send them to military personnel overseas.

Now, my brother had been in the service years before and he readily admitted that getting care packages in the mail from complete strangers was very uplifting, especially when they came with a hand-written letter.  He said that one of of his friends actually got married to a girl that had sent a care package, and he wrote back to her.  My brother did say that things like toiletries were a dime a dozen.  Everyone was sending them.  But what the troops were really after were oreos, or good coffee, or books.  He said that when his squadron got care packages they would unload everything onto a table that was out in the hall.

The table was sectioned off with boxes.  Boxes for candy, boxes for soap, boxes for gum.  Whoever got to open the box naturally had first dibs, and he said that when he came across a box of kettle corn popcorn he snatched it up like pure gold.  So when we decided to launch Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops we did go to local businesses for donations, but we went to the local coffee shop and got bags of really good coffee, and we sent a coffee maker for good measure.  We went to the local eye doctors and got sunglasses.  We sent homemade chocolate chip cookies by the dozens.  If we were low on supplies we were always sending out those chocolate chip cookies at least.  It turns out that there is nothing quite so valuable as some of those.

So if you ever get a chance to drop a box off at your local Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops site, be assured that the best is being done to send the best possible care package!

Brianna sighed and blew a stray piece of hair out of her eyes.  Her forehead was damp with sweat, and the problematic strand didn’t go very far.  As a matter of fact, it blew out and then swung right back and got tangled in her eyelashes.  She sighed and pushed it back, pinning it into place with a clip.  Gathering all of her strength, from the inside out, she picked up another stack of moving boxes.  She tried not to think of the finality, of everything that came with moving.  It was never just as simple as packing your stuff and moving it from one location to another.  The process was stressful from start to finish.  Especially when you had to do it alone.  Especially when it was the end of something that you didn’t really want to end.

In Brianna’s case, it was the passing of her father.  Her mother was moving down south, and the home her parents had shared for thirty plus years needed to be split up, shipped out, and sold off.  Unfortunately, none of her brothers or sisters decided they had room in their garages for moving boxes full of memorabilia, and so they blew off the reality of all the work by saying, “You take it all, Brianna, whatever you want.  We know Dad would want you to have it.”  What this meant was that Brianna got to be the one in charge of it all.  She got to go through each piece of her past, and decide which pile to put it in.  Did it get donated?  Did she take it?  She wanted so much of it, but at what point do you just have to stop?  She wanted to save so much of it for her own children, but how do you choose which things are the most important?

Her mother had run away to Florida shortly after the funeral.  Exhausted and traumatized from the swift and violent sickness her late husband had succumbed to, she couldn’t even begin to fathom shutting down her old life.  She needed it just to disappear.  And that was what Brianna was trying to do.  So, little by little, it disappeared into the moving boxes, and some would go down south, and some would go home with her, but most of it would go home with strangers.  Maybe that was better.  After all, it was just stuff.  None of it would bring her dad back, and she wasn’t getting rid of her memories.

Every day, riding our bikes home from school, we would spot the cardboard shipping boxes a ways off, as if they were a signal to our brains, and we would pick up speed and race past that house with our eyes trained straight ahead.  It was of the utmost importance that we did not make contact with any part of the house.

We all thought that the man who lived there was watching us, and that if he thought you were taking notice of him or his property he would hunt you down and add you to his list of victims.  This is because there was a legend about this guy, who of course lived alone.  His blinds were always drawn, and every window and every door was always closed, even to the garage.  The odd thing about this particular situation was that this man’s home was not in disarray- there was no peeling paint, there were no overgrown weeds and hedges.  He did not drag a metal garbage can scraping down the driveway.  In fact, everyone got the opposite vibe from him.

There was not a leaf out of place on his lawn.  The landscaping was done to perfection, all the flowerbed lines perfectly cut and maintained.  Every single flower and blade of grass was healthy.  We often saw him kneeling on his gardening mat, with a plastic bucket next to him, and he would pick out blades of grass and browning petals.  At his front door there were always those cardboard shipping boxes.  The UPS guy made a delivery just about every stinking day.  We could always expect to see one sitting there when we road by, and then we would checkjust before supper and it was always gone.

We speculated as to why he dealt with so many cardboard shipping boxes, and all’s we could come up with was illegal activity.  We figured body parts, cleverly disguised in machinery.  We figured torture tools, because no one would look at such innocent mail and think: murder material.  I think we all knew that the whole thing was just a story that the neighborhood kids fixated on, but then we were also afraid that it was really true, while we were trying to think that it wasn’t.  Whatever the case, we moved away when I was in seventh grade, and to this day whenever I see cardboard shipping boxes waiting on someone’s doorstep I get a little chill down my spine.