Looking Through Treasures

Zephaniah 3:17 Says, "The Lord your God is with you---he will quiet you with His love, he will rejoice over you with singing"... This verse really has no relationship to what I decided to write about today except that it is one of my favorite verses, indeed one of my "treasures". With this cancer recurrance, and being a little more unsure about the future (which none of us know anyway), we are trying to sell our home and move in with one of our children, to make it easier for them to provide care for either or both of us. As we sift through our treasures and try to decide what to keep and what to get rid of, lots of remembrances come to light. I discovered some "ration books" from the 1940's. For those of you who are much younger than 70+, this means little. During World War II, many products were rationed and to buy these items, each family had ration books--pages of stamps which were torn out when a particular item was bought. You could not buy that item again until the next period of new ration books. These items included shoes, gasoline, certain canned foods, dry cleaning service, sugar, tires, cigarettes, and so on. Even the colored dye on the cigarette packages were removed and plain packaging replaced the colors. Children "balled up" the foil from chewing gum sticks and made big balls of this "metal" for the war effort. I can remember my grandfather obtaining an extra 5 pounds of sugar on the "black market" and how excited we were for this and Christmas baking. We hid the sugar until we got to use it! During this time period my dad was in Europe for two years and we moved in with my grandparents...I can also remember cereal boxes with all the US aircraft on the boxes so we children could identify all our country's airplanes. Lots of memories and many more treasures to go through and pass on to the next few generations.