Thinking about the box.

[Ysobelle at aol_com]

When this question came up the first time, I didn't really think much about it. I didn't have a box.
Now I do. 

It's a small, gold-hinged, cedar box with a small padlock on the front and two small keys which I may never use. It's about eleven inches long, five inches wide, and maybe five inches high. It weighs maybe two pounds. Maybe four. The top edges are slightly rounded, and it has little feet at each corner. It still smells of the tree. It came to me over the counter in a heavy white cardboard box, slightly taller than a shoebox, and weightier. It had a seal on it, with pawprints, and a label on one end with a date and my family's name. But the inner box is the important one.

Okay, no, I take that back. This is about thinking outside the box, right? Because I'm trying very hard not to think about what, exactly, is in that box. That's not important. I'm very much thinking outside of it. I'm thinking about wet noses and warm spots on the bed and tumbleweeds of fur that made my vacuum cry and "I got food stuck in my teeth, Mom-- fix this, would you?" and "I get three treats in the morning; that was only two" and never being able to go anywhere formal without a lint brush and not really caring and wanting to go home to my this-is-as-good-as-Christmas welcome every day. That's all something that won't fit into a box.

It's easier to remember that now than it was this afternoon when I first got that cardboard timebomb-- unwieldy and surreally clinical. I took it outside and cried hysterically, holding onto it and thinking over and over, "I'm so sorry." Driving home kind of shell-shocked, with my mother sitting next to me, and for most of the evening, I couldn't really grasp the whole concept of how ultimately unimportant this box is. It was a major, if dreaded and expected, tumble on my road out of this wretched, stupid, clingy fog.

But I'm slowly working back up out of the ditch and onto the road. As slightly-creepily comforting as it is to finally have this box here, sitting up on a shelf in my childhood bedroom (next to another small box that holds a carefully-painted eggshell with a heart on it that has been up on that shelf for years), I'm regaining the beginnings of the perspective that there's nothing IN that box. That everything that makes that box important isn't in there. Or at least, it isn't any more. If I'm thinking inside the box, I'm thinking about something painful and dark and  quite literally dead and gone. I'm thinking about things that have nowhere to go. If I'm thinking outside the box, I'm thinking about keeping the people you love warm and true hearts and sleeping when you're tired and being a good friend and loving peanut butter and nothing's better than a good ear rub.

So that's it. That's my answer to "When you think outside the box, what kind of box is it?" True to form, it's a little on the bizarre side, but it's my own brand of strange serendipity.  And, of course, it's also several months late. But of course, lessons don't always come when they're called. But if they leave you with a full heart and a broken vacuum cleaner belt, they're probably worth it.
---------------
Unsubscribe by going to http://www.actwin.com/OtR/