Last weekend, my husband and I participated in my annual “Purgapalooza”, AKA Spring Cleaning. I don’t know how we acquire so much crap between two people, but we definitely downsized. Value Village reaped the benefits of our clothes that don’t get worn, books that don’t get read, and other knick-knacks that we had for no reason. It feels good to Spring Clean—I get a sick satisfaction from it.

But with any deep cleaning and reorganization comes random unexpected reflection. For instance, I reorganized all the photo albums in our house and it’s great to look through old photos. I also streamlined some of my final boxes of stuff from back home in Wisconsin, and seeing my old Nintendo set with all the random games made me smile. But, there was one special thing I found that caught my eye and caused me to have very memorable flashbacks-Pass the Pigs.

What is this? Well, it’s a travel game from Milton Bradley. My parents bought me it sometime in the mid 90s. It’s basically a dice game, but with rubber pigs. My dad and I got a kick out of it. I remember us playing it poolside at various hotel pools, like the Pioneer Inn in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or various Embassy Suites. See, my dad rarely used his sick days and personal days and I believe he could bank them to be used later on. So there would be some weekends that my parents and I would just drive out of town to an Embassy suites for a night or two, just to go do something. We’d swim, we’d hit an outlet mall, maybe mini golf, we’d enjoy the appetizer happy hour and cooked-to-order breakfast. And my dad and I would play these silly travel games.

The thing that made me smile the most when I found this game was the fact that there still is a score sheet attached from the last game I played with my dad. Apparently I beat him, 61-55 points. Who knows if we were even playing it correctly, or if I was cheating keeping score. But seeing this score sheet makes me happy. I plan on always keeping that piece of paper, and I plan on always keeping this game. Pass the Pigs survived Purgapalooza 2014.