Our bank is closing their local branch, so we had to go over and take everything out of the safe deposit box and move it to another location. They obviously wanted us to move it to the next nearest branch, which happens to be near up the Y, which wouldn’t be wildly inconvenient, but there is a “hometown” bank right in Joppatowne that offered the same size box for $10 less a year.
So much for retiree benefits.
Before taking the contents to the new bank, we spread everything on the dining room table to take a look at what we had. Home inventory photos needed to be updated, some items moved to local daughter’s safe deposit box. (Hint: do not put your will or your Medical Directive [living will] in your safe deposit box. Ever, ever, ever.) I must have had a dozen copies of my dad’s death certificate, but did not see a single one for my mom. Obviously, I had one, as I managed to close out her estate. Eventually.
Once we got it all sorted out we trekked over to Hometown Bank to get a new box. While we were sitting at the manager’s desk, I noticed the box of tissue, which was labeled “Spring Grove”. Always nosey, I picked it up and turned it over, to see that it had been manufactured in Spring Grove, OH. The manager chuckled. “Obviously, Spring Grove doesn’t mean there what it means here”.
I told her Spring Grove hadn’t always been simply a mental asylum; it had also been a tuberculosis sanitarium.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. I had two relatives who died there. One was sick and the other was crazy.”
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