Rummaging About

Yesterday my parents and I once again drove to the cottage, but spent most of the day at our rented storage room (previously mentioned), trying to clear out as much unnecessary, unused stuff as possible. And when I say stuff, I mean stuff--things that haven't seen the light of day in twenty years.

I dug through a box filled with mine and my brothers drawings and various other creative manifestations. Mine were depictions of houses or parents or princesses or baby birds in nests. My brother's were usually hockey goalies or battle scenes with tanks and dying soldiers with guns larger than their bodies. My parents sorted through boxes and boxes of books--and my father found his complete, hard-back series of classical literature--and sorted out the books we no longer needed, enough to "furnish our own library," according to my father. They would soon find their home at the big, metal container at the recycling center.

For lunch, we went to my grandmother's, who had placed a basin of water and soap out in the garden for us to wash up.

She had made us oven sausage, though she forgot to peel off its orange wrapper before cooking, which my mother ate, thinking it was strips of bell pepper. In her defense, she said it tasted a bit plastic.

A bumblebee joined us for lunch.

We barely had a moment to breathe out after our meal--such is life--and we drove the short distance back to our many bags and packages of yet-to-be-sorted things. I found some stamps, a book of traffic signs, and a plastic bag of letters sent between my parents when they were young and far apart.

A beautiful day.

Found the John Carter sci-fi series in an old box. Both parents mystified as to how it got there. Suspect it may have been a part of my grandfather's collection. My mother reminded me the other day that women have only been allowed to vote in the past hundred years, and with this new found freedom, they have chosen to cower in bikini-clad terror whilst their man-candy in red underwear fights off the evil alien for them. Good to know.

Did you know that Sweden was one of the first independent nations to grant women the right to vote? Between 1718 and 1771, Swedish women, if they were taxpaying members of a city guild, could vote in local and national elections, though the first right was rescinded in 1758 and the latter in 1771, with the signing of the new constitution. Women were given back their right to vote in 1921.

My grandfather didn't have a coin jar. But he did have a coin purse.    An American dollar minted in 1922.