Goodie Boxes

There was a time, you may remember (long before internet shopping sprees and weekly Amazon book deliveries greeting you at the front stoop) that receiving a package was out of the ordinary enough to send you into Christmas-morning-like excitement. Remember when ordering things from a catalog sometimes meant up to thirteen weeks for delivery? You would get something and be excited about it...but have no memory what-so-ever what it was supposed to be. But it was still a package and it was for you and that was cool.

A similar, but very different package was the "goodie box" that every so often would have your name on it during mail call in the Army. Mine would come with my mothers handwriting in black sharpie on well-taped brown grocery bag wrapping. Usually a letter that would make me homesick, some field notes from a hunting trip torn from a small yellow note pad (sometimes with camo face-paint stains...and blood) but always a large batch of chocolate chip cookies. The ones mom makes. With real butter.

But I have not received a goodie box in a long time. Which made the package I got from a friend in Arkansas the other day all the more awesome. A sampling of some of the cool things he has been doing on the vise this summer. I opened it up and felt like a kid at an odd sort of haunted house...rats, soft hackles, space frogs...and spiders. Oh my. Almost better than cookies!