Unique Serving Platter

Cardboard boxes aren’t just for the homeless to sleep inside of. There are many, many things that a cardboard box can be used for. In fact, with a little bit of creativity and some imagination, an ordinary cardboard box can become just about anything. The homeless people fight over the large ones sometimes, hoping that they can crawl inside to escape the elements of the weather. Moving to a new residence can require lots of lots of cardboard boxes in order to safely relocate everything. A cardboard box can be used to transport anything from plants to groceries, and anything else you can imagine.

Practical uses for a cardboard box just aren’t very exciting. Children can take a box and turn it into a castle or a boat. As a child, my parents got a new refrigerator delivered. The delivery guys took it out of this large cardboard box. I would not let my parents break the cardboard box apart and get rid of it. That simple box remained in our basement for months and months before my parents finally convinced me that it was taking up too much room. But, I had so many adventures inside of that box. During a slumber party, my girlfriends and I were pirates on the high seas looking for treasure. We turned it into a mansion at one time. I slept in it a few times just to see what it felt like to be a homeless person. I ate some snacks and meals in that huge cardboard box. To me, it wasn’t just a box - it was a treasure.

Children are like that. I am amazed at the fact that my young daughter is sometimes more interested in the cardboard box or bag that a gift came in, than actually playing with the gift she received. I should just wrap up a few cardboard boxes for her to play with. She’d probably love it. Not only does she like cardboard boxes, but our cats do as well. After we moved into a new home, we had empty and full cardboard boxes everywhere for a few weeks. Our cats would hide inside of the empty ones until you walked past them. They would pick the perfect moment to attack and try to give us a heart attack. While that didn’t work, they did cause me to jump more than once. My daughter enjoyed playing hide and seek for a while. Oh, the joys of a cardboard box.

When I was a little girl I loved going to the swimming pool each and every day of the summer. My mom was a single mom and she had to work, and that meant we spent our days with our babysitter. Her teenage daughter took us to the local pool each day and I would love to be there. In fact, there would be days when you could not get me out of the pool. When it rained we could not go swimming and I would be very disappointed. This went on for quite a few summers until my mom no longer needed to work all the time and we could stay home with her. Though I was a great swimmer, I was always scared of the diving board.

The pool in our town was small, but our town was small too. Though it was not the biggest one around, it was always clean, and when thinking about size versus cleanliness, I always prefer that something is clean. There were two diving boards there and one large slide. The smaller diving board was only about four feet from the water and though it took me a while, I finally got the courage up to use it. When it came to the large diving board, well that was a different story entirely. I was only eight then and that board seemed to climb up into the sky.

It took me a long time to get the nerve up to climb up on the high diving board and though thinking back, it wasn’t even very big. I finally got up there one day and had to climb back down. I never really considered myself to be afraid of heights because I loved to climb high up in trees. The thought of hurling myself down from that height was unthinkable. I love to be up high, but when I was in a tree, I never dreamed of jumping down, even when water was involved. This was just something I knew I needed to do, so I tried again.

I finally go the nerve up to jump off that high diving board and though it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be, it was not something that I ever did again. Even now when I am swimming I don’t really care for the high diving board. I guess there is just something scary about diving in head first from that height that I might never get over. Now that I am over 30, I don’t think there is anything that anyone can do to change my mind.