Posted by:
SusieQ#1
(
)
Date: October 21, 2010 04:14PM
This is one of the stories in my autobiographical collection.
The Relief Society Homemaking Project- decorated waste baskets from ice cream barrels, early 1960's 37th Married Student Ward, on BYU campus.
One of the many Relief Society Homemaking projects that I will never forget involved ice cream barrels that we procured from the local ice cream stores in Provo, UT in the 60's.
Some of us would call the ice cream shops and pick them up before they were thrown out.Then we would wash them and dry them.
Then, we would decorate them in Relief Society Homemaking Meeting in the basement of one of the Wymount Terrace buildings on campus.
I remember putting all kinds of funny things on them: tiny pom-pom balls, rick-rack and covering them in cloth or wall paper! We were recycling even back then!
One Christmas as very poor students, I decorated one waste paper basket for my mother and one for my mother in law as presents and managed to get them in our little car and drive them all the way to Portland, Oregon.
The one I gave to my mother was kept by her favorite over-stuffed chair in the living room. Mother had polio many years before then suffered many strokes and now spent a lot of time in her favorite chair next to her small bookcase reading and doing crossword puzzles, and napping.
Mother loved her dogs. She had a little white cock-a-poo-mix, called "Cookie" that never left her side and used to sit by her on the wide arm of her large chair. "Cookie" got old and a little blind and would often sleep on the arm of that chair with Mother. Most days both of them fell asleep in the chair.
One day, when I called home, I asked about her little dog "Cookie." Mother told me that "Cookie" died. "She is pretty old," I said, "I guess it was her time."
"Well, mother said, "Cookie fell into the waste basket and broke her neck!" I gasped! "The waste basket?" I asked. "Yes," she said, "you remember the one you made me for Christmas a long time ago?"
I have never been sure whether "Cookie" died on the arm of the chair and fell off or fell off in her sleep and the waste basket broke her neck and she died. Either way, that little decorated ice cream barrel is forever associated with the death of "Cookie" and a Relief Society Project of recycling by very poor students at Christmas time!
Ahh, the days of Relief Society Projects!