What's in my bag?
Today, my bag is bursting with personality and filth.
My bag is a microcosm of my life. I have fig newtons, and extremely high gloss lip gloss called “Squishies” that my eight-year-old neice promised would make me feel gorgeous, and of course, scratched sunglasses and loose tampons, and individual moist towlettes, a lion finger puppet and a single diaper, a tiny shark figurine that lights up, a few used tissues, pens without caps, an inky banana, a baby fedora, some stones that are vaguely shaped like hearts, and a green ziplock baggie of my grandmother’s ashes,.
Do you remember “What’s in my bag?”
It used to be (and maybe still is) a feature in Us magazine, the tabloid famous for telling us that Stars are just like us! because because they have granola bars and photos of their dogs and twenty years ago, cigarettes.
Today, I feel just like a star, maybe one aging into anxiety about if my career will weather middle age, if I can get the quirky mom and brash boss roles, because my bag has some unique items in it that straddle youth to middle age.
My bag is always full of things now, because I am a mom, and I am afraid of throwing away even a used tisssue or a half-eaten cookie because I may need it in some desperate moment that will surely materialize as soon as I clean out my bag. I envision these moments, being stuck on the side of a long lonesome highway with my two kids screaming in their car seats, trapped in an elevator or held hostage in a basement. In these fantasies, I save the day with my half a banana, my pens; the light up shark figurine leads us to safety.
The bag is a bit extra because I have just returned home from a trip. Or rather, I have just returned from a trip home. We were in Key West, Florida to say goodbye to my grandmother’s house, the grandmother who I lived with for four years and whose remains are now living in much more modest real estate, the grandmother who I can’t quite say goodbye to, despite her funeral, and her house with the FOR SALE sign in the yard, and the 41 years of warning I’ve had that this was coming. We took the kids to toddle around in the bermuda grass of her front yard, to sleep under the creaky ceiling fan in the back bedroom where I used to live, to chase the lizards that lay claim to the patio, to name the chicks that are born every spring under the hibiscus bushes.
Flying from the old Florida home to the new Swiss home feels like time travel between different lives. The days of living barefoot and a bit lonely, in half-light in my apartment over the garage (my upgrade from the back bedroom), bicycling to work, swimming in the bathwater warm ocean, watching Jeopardy with Granny Jane and my cat, to the days of waking early to the sound of my son crying, watching the sun rise over the Alps, kissing my husband before I leave for work, trying to steal tiny slivers of time for myself in the car or the toilet during a day that feels entirely constructed of others’ demands, falling into bed exhausted but generally happy at 9 pm, to wake 6 (or 5 or 4) to do it again.
It is a privilege and a drain. It is purposeful and exhausting. And covered in yogurt. It is my bag.
My dad has stayed in Florida to sell my Granny’s house. He called me this morning to tell me he found the ashes of my cat, Dennis, tucked away with a ceramic of his paw print, in a blue and white bowl in my old bedroom at my granny’s. 2025: the year of the ashes. They are selling her house for an amount of money that would have left her speechless. I cried in the car after dropping off my kids, thinking of that bag of cat ashes, how I had looked for it frantically while I was at granny’s and everyone else was having a drink on the porch – I didn’t want to admit I had lost them, because it felt like a betrayal of Dennis. How he curled up next to me and kept me company before I had a husband and kids, before anyone needed me much at all, when life felt much more like a semi-obscured winding pathway and less like a highway with exits flying by, how he was there the night I miscarried in the bathroom with blue fish wallpaper, and many other nights that I was alone and bleeding for less dramatic reasons.
Ashes and diapers. The begginning and the end, with me somewhere in the middle, not sure if I am closer in time to diapers or ashes, but knowing where I’m heading.
After that call, I took granny’s ashes out of the plastic bag and emptied them into the little blue ceramic pot that mom and I picked out at a shop in Islamorada. It didn’t have a lid, and my husband cut a wine bottle cork down to the right size and left it with the blue pot on my desk as if to gently say “It is time to put this away.” And it gave me the feeling that not just my past, but my future was in good hands.
When I emptied the ashes into the pot, I was surprised at the feel of it – I had expected something uniform, like fine sand, but it was gritty and grainy with chunks of what I assume is bone. It wasn’t gruesome, it was intimate, handling the stuff that is left of my granny’s body. It made me think of how her body felt in its previous form, all of the intimacies I shared with her, combing her curls and tweezing her chin hairs in the sunshine on the back patio, helping her file her toenails and rub lotion into the dry skin of her calves. And now these gestures were poured into this tiny pot.
I ask Dad to scatter Dennis in the backyard. I put Granny Jane on a beam that runs above our bed, so I can look at her pot sometimes but not all the time. I might scatter her in Lac Leman this summer, because she always said she wanted to visit us here, but it was too late in her life to make the trip.
It makes me think of Thich Nhat Hanh, whose students wanted to bury him so that they could visit him. He said he would only allow it if the tombstone read “He is not here.”
Granny Jane is not in the blue pot. Dennis is not in the baggie in Key West. They are not in my bag.
But maybe they are in that moment alone in the car, hurtling down the autoroute to Geneva, when it is just me and my thoughts, the window down and the sound of air and life rushing by so so incredibly fast.