It wasn’t the first time I threw the suitcase away, but it would be the last.
It was one of those clunky affairs that zips all around and opens to what my mother always called her hanging bag. The plaid monstrosity had accompanied my mother on every trip in my memory, but specifically all the trips from Virginia to visit me in California over the 30-year period before she finally moved here herself, bulging plaid suitcase in tow.
“It’s the one with a silver ribbon tied on it,” Mom would shout to my late husband when we picked her up at the airport. “See, here it comes around on the luggage rack.”
As though you could miss it.
George would cheerfully lift it off the rounder, noting that she must have her whole life in it.
Those words stuck in my head when we found the suitcase at the back of the garage during a clean-out after Mom passed away. We had covered it in plastic, just as she did when she stored it, but it definitely was ragged around the edges.
I had tried hard to be brutal about the garage purge, just like the clutter control articles suggest. “If you haven’t used it in a year, you don’t need it.”
Following that philosophy, boxes of needless “stuff” were piled by our curb for pickup the next morning. Of course, I didn’t “need” the hanging bag.
Yet, I had gone to bed with visions of it in my head. All the times Mom had unzipped it to reveal a gift. The most treasured one was the potato masher from my childhood that she brought on her trip to care for me after my mastectomy.
In the middle of the night, I got out of bed and slipped out the back door. My stomach was tight with concern that someone had already taken the suitcase. Reaching the curb, I shined my flashlight on top of the heap, and there it was, just where I left it. I dragged it up the driveway: It was made before wheels on luggage were a thing. I opened the garage door and tucked it in a corner. As I was about to leave, I heard my mother’s voice in my head. Dutifully, I found some plastic sheeting and wrapped it around the suitcase. It stayed there for eight years, until after the Eaton fire, when I found it covered in ash.
I removed the silver ribbon before the final farewell, washed it and tied it on my suitcase. The tradition lives on.
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