Present and Past Family History

140. Creative Children. All those Christmas presents? Who needs 'em! All we really need is paper, markers and scissors for a really good time. Oh, and I almost forgot tape. Lots and lots of tape. The spy theme lives on!




141. An essay by my grandmother. I was reading through a book of her writing today. It made me laugh.

L-----'s Law

If you want to know if something is valuable or not, just throw it away. You will need it almost immediately.

Our attic and basement and all the nooks and cranies and spaces in between are full of stuff, brimming full. But the one thing we throw away, we need almost immediately.

I had lids of butter tubs piling up all over, so I counted and threw a bunch away. Now we can't find enough lids for those butter tubs. We use them to store meal-sized portions of food in the deep freeze. Some of the lids we have are stretching. I need more lids.

I threw out our old teacher's certificates for the state of Utah. The next year Alpine District offered a raise in pay - another step up on the salary schedule - for those who had taught for fifteen years and had twenty extra hours of college credit. We both qualified. but we had to prove we had been certified teachers for that long. And I had thrown away our old teacher's certificates.

We went to the state board offices to see if we could get copies of the old certificates. This was in the days before duplicators. They had the copies in their files, but could not lend them for us to copy. The district demanded a copy. After about three trips to Salt Lake, we got them to sign a paper, saying we had held teacher's certificates at that time. It worked.

I could go on and on. If you want to know if something is valuable, put it away. You'll never need it again.