Last week, I admitted to being a purger. A thrower-outer. An anti-hoarder, if you will. But that wasn’t entirely true. As I casually mentioned at the end of that blog, there is one thing I do hoard …
Boxes. Brown, corrugated shipping boxes. All shapes and sizes. My collection is mostly boxes from Amazon, but any delivery box that’s sturdy and clean will do.
I’m not entirely sure when my obsession started. But in 2019, my oldest son (H) moved to Connecticut to finish out his last two years of high school at a boarding school. That’s when I started collecting boxes in earnest.
Having my then 16-year-old manchild move five hours away from home was somewhat devastating. My coping mechanism—besides bombarding him with texts and weekly phone calls—was to mail him monthly care packages.
In addition to holidays (like Halloween and Valentine’s Day) and study periods (like midterms and finals), I’d find any excuse to send him a box filled with nonsense. Snacks, socks, batteries … You name it. If it fit in the box, I was mailing it. I think it was my way of letting him know I missed him.
To my chagrin, my box-collecting habit has grown since 2019.
After boarding school, H moved to Vermont for college, and I continued sending him packages throughout his four years there. During that time, my youngest (O) started college in Virginia, so you know that that means … I needed to send him care packages, too. As a result, my box pile grew exponentially.
Nowadays, H is living and working in Massachusetts and O is in his third year in college. With both boys living away from home, I’m still hoarding boxes and sending care packages—just with a little less frequency. After all, Amazon is way more convenient than dealing with the US Post Office.
—LJDT
