When I was very little, probably about three or four, I have a dim memory of going with my mother to the Haines Food Center which occupied the space to the south of the post office.  She did all of her grocery shopping there.  The Helmers ran the store.  My dim memory is of going there to access the food locker that Mom and Dad rented.  Back in those days no one owned a freezer.  In order to freeze the meat that you butchered on the farm, you rented a food locker.  Marjorie similarly remembers her uncle, Tom, having a food locker at Jackson's Food Market, where he put the deer that he got every year.

I only remember going to the food locker once, because shortly thereafter my parents purchased an International Harvester chest freezer.  That freezer is one of my earliest memories because Mom always kept a supply of popsicles there for Tim and I.  We still have that freezer.  We're still using it.  That freezer is nigh onto 70 years old!  Nothing these days is made to last like that.

Back in those days they didn't have plastic bags to put your groceries in.  Interestingly, Oregon outlawed plastic bags just three months ago, so we're back where we started.  The Helmer's grocery supplies all arrived at their store in cardboard boxes, so Mom's grocery purchases were all sent home in cardboard boxes.  The boxes would accumulate until Mom would hand me some matches, and give me instructions to carry all the boxes out to the rock pile beside the creek and burn them.  I loved that duty because I could stack them into a city which I could watch burn, and imagine myself saving all the poor, helpless people who were trapped therein.