This is inspired by my cousin Jay’s latest post.

She was breaking up and jettisoning an old box. I do that frequently. When my father-in-law was alive, he saved all kinds of boxes at the Moldy Old Hoton Lake cabin (since rebuilt). Every once in a while (when he wasn’t there), the Twinz of Terror would rampage through the cabin gathering old boxes. They would build a big bonfire and burn baby burn. They also cleared the cabin of old pieces of wood. If you are a mechanical engineer of a certain sort, you keep little pieces of wood because they can be “useful”. And I guess they were, to the Gumper. Me? I am laughing so hard writing this that I can hardly stand up.

Do not get me wrong. I loved my father-in-law dearly and I think he reciprocated that. That said, he had a whole lotta people to love with 10 kids and 19 grandchildren. But I landed in a good place in terms of in-laws.

So the Dewar’s box I will NEVER get rid of! It is wooden and it had been around since before I was born and I think it moved from the Old Cabin to the moomincabin when we built the moomin. It is also the box that my cat Twinkle’s second litter of kittens (I knooooow) was born in. We knew she was pregnant and one morning, her water had broken. I was maybe seven and my mother did not explain this to me in detail. But suddenly there was a tiny orange kitten in the box (Butterscotch nee Butterball). That was the signal for us kids to run down the path to the Mullin cabin to get the Mullin kids to come and watch the rest of the litter get born. They had a phone but we didn’t.

And then there’s the Red Owl box. This is a close up and you can’t see that it isn’t an exactly rectangular box, the top is larger than the base and there are handles on each end. I think this box is in the moomingarage and I hope to hell “no one” has thrown it out or burned it. When I was a kid, there were three “main” grocery stores in Sault Ste. Siberia plus some smaller ones and bunches of mom-and-pop stores. We most often went to the A&P but fairly frequently to the Red Owl and occasionally to the Piggly Wiggly.

The Red Owl handed out free stuff on a weekly basis. We got the Currier and Ives “china” from there, which we still have in the moomincabin. I think that’s also where we got the Golden Book encyclopedia set. The one with pictures that I read as maybe a second grader, up until maybe about the “E” book. I do remember reading about daguerreotypes (but don’t really remember what they are).

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