Packing anything and everything into storage at the last moment, meant I kept a LOT of junk I should have thrown out, but I just didn't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with it. I just hope that if something should happen to me, my sons will plow through all the junk and find the really important-to-my-heart items like their Grandpa Walter's Thing Boxes, and Grandma Snoonie's "before View Master" film viewer, and the costumes my parents wore when they worked in the circus, and my dad's cartoon drawings.
We all have those special items... mine just might sound a little stranger than most. Thus, the Sand bottles...
In 1968, my parents and I went on a 2 week vacation through Las Vegas, Nevada, Kanab, Utah and Phoenix, Arizona. It was really fun. We stayed at Perry Lodge in Kanab and I made best friends with the owner's daughter who was also 11. We palled around for 4 or 5 days and on the morning that we were to leave, we found this sand bottle on our room doorstep with a postcard from my vacation friend, Wanda Lewis. I thought it was beautiful, and she explained on the card that she had made it from sand in a nearby cave.
A couple years after that, my parents were making out a will and decided that they didn't want to be buried in California and they also didn't want to be shipped back to the Mid-west where they each were raised, so they decided on Kanab since we had had such an enjoyable time there. It was just fun and relaxing, and my dad had a good time driving out in the desert to old movie sites and picking up do-dads he'd found while my mom and I lounged around the pool. Perhaps a kind of crazy reasoning, but Kanab got put down on paper.
Sadly, my dad passed away in 1973, and was cremated. My mother and I packed him up in her Toyota and drove to Utah. That whole story about this is for a whole 'nother day, but I will tell you that when we arrived in Kanab to see the cemetery, it was nothing but red clay and it broke my mother's heart.
ANYWAY, Wanda's family was no longer there, but we asked the new managers where this cave might be that she had gotten such pretty sand. It was not far from town, but since it is on Private Property, I will not tell the directions of the site here. My mom and I went and explored the cave, and it had layers of the most beautiful varying colors of sand... greens, yellows, black, gold, reds, some whitish. We gathered a little of it up and stored the memory.
In 2009, during Spring Break, I took my sons for a trip down to the South West. We stopped at Bryce Canyon, Kanab, Lake Havasu, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and Arches National Park.... with a lot of stops inbetween as well. We had a great trip, in this van in fact - which is one of the reasons why I wanted to fix it and didn't want to just sell it as junk.
While in Kanab, we stayed at Perry Lodge, visited the cemetery which looks way more beautiful now with grass and a black iron fence, and planning to stop at the cave, I brought some bottles, and the boys made their very own sand bottles. So even though it is just sand in some old bottles, they are precious to me.
My Sand bottle from Wanda.
The bottles the boys made.
During the day, I also took my first trip to a laundromat. Lived in town 10 years and it was the first time I had ever gone inside of the place. Wash was $2 a load, and dry was 25 cents for 6 or 8 minutes. I knew that not having a washer and dryer was something I was going to miss, but the experience was not that bad. Just feels like a lot of wasted time when it seems you could be doing other things as well.
Saw a few funny signs posted up:
:)
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