I often hear stories from my forty-eight students of how generous their grandparents are with them when it comes to both items and time spent together.Recently, I was reminiscing about those ideas and how they applied to my grandmother, my brother, and me. My grandparents weren't dirt poor, but they most definitely were not wealthy, either. Every summer of my entire childhood, we would travel out to Arizona or New Mexico (they moved around a bit) to see them.
It was the best feeling when we finally pulled into Nana and Papaw's driveway. When Nana saw us, she would hug and kiss us, crying tears of joy all at the same time. Papaw was slightly less demonstrative. He was a tall, strong, quiet Swedish man, who let Nana get her loving in first, but always had a big bear hug waiting for us.
But after the hugs, the kisses, the unpacking of the car, Nana feeding the undernourished (in her opinion) occupants of the car, and cleaning the dishes, then out would come the S & H green stamps that she had been collecting since we had left the previous summer. (I'm including an image for those of you not familiar with these stamps. They were given with purchases at groceries, gas stations, drugstores, to name a few. The stamps were then redeemable for merchandise.)
Nana would collect boxes and boxes of these stamps over the course of the year, and it was up to my brother and me to lick the stamps, put them into the booklets, and then count how many booklets we were able to fill with stamps. Then, Nana would hand us the S & H Green Stamp catalog, and Randy and I would start to plan how we would divvy the wealth of the stamps to get items we wanted.
Like I said, my grandparents didn't have a lot of money, but when Nana gave us these stamps and booklets, we felt like the richest kids on earth.
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| S & H Green Stamps and booklets |
As always, thanks to Stacey and Ruth at Two Writing Teachers for hosting the Slice of Life Challenge!
