Skill Sets

We lived for several years in rural Vermont. It's a nice place to live and all—very pretty in the fall—but can I just say that making a living there can be challenging, especially if one happens to have moved there right out of college?

One of my innumerable odd jobs during our tenure in the Green Mountain State was shipping and receiving for a small distributor of environmentally friendly products, a job in which I learned to cut down and reconfigure reclaimed cardboard boxes—it was the environmentally friendly thing to do—faster than normal people can pick a box cutter and tape gun out of an ordinary lineup of odd tools that make other people's lives easier. But that was a long time ago, and over the years my familiarity with the vagaries of cardboard and the wiles of packing tape diminished into a vague, "don't I know you from somewhere" kind of acquaintanceship.

Or so I'd imagined until the day I needed to ship something for work and I couldn't find a box for it anywhere.