Shoe box Activity

There were times in which people had to just leave their homes behind. As well as pretty much anything that they owned. This was especially true during the pioneer days. Many times these people had to leave everything behind, they didn’t have the luxury of big moving trucks to help them take everything that they wanted with them. They only had room to take pretty much what they could carry, essentially they could only take what they could fit in a shoe box.

My professor thought of this shoe box activity when reading the story ‘Pioneer Cat’ by William H. Hooks. In this story a little girl and her family were pioneers who were about to leave on the Oregon trail. She was told that she could only bring things that would fit in a box. She decided to bring a cat that she found.

So, the prompt for this activity would be if you had to leave your house now and could only bring what could fit in a shoe box what would you bring with you? However, for this prompt we were told that family and pets were a given; those are not things that we would need to worry about stuffing into our shoe boxes.

This was a difficult thing for me to think about. What could I not live without? It took me a very long time to fill my box up. To me, when it came right down to it I found that there weren’t really many things that I felt that I absolutely needed. So, for most things I decided to go with kind of survival things. I ended up bring an umbrella, my phone and charger, my wallet, a notebook, and a picture of my uncle Tim; he has passed away so I wanted something to really remember him by.

If you were doing this activity what would you choose? Would you go sentimental? Survival? Both?