The things we carry

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Handbagsedit 668x800After a couple of times out, you learn to pack correctly. You also learn the more you take with you, the more you have to wash when you get home. It’s still difficult to pack for every climate we may encounter. I’ve mentioned I’ve overdone it with the sweaters before, but I’m getting better about not caring if I have to wear the same hoodie four days in a row. I still insist on having my make-up bag with me, and I still carry a purse, so I haven’t given up entirely on being a girl.

I often wonder where my husband carries all his stuff when I’m not with him and he doesn’t have my purse. He and my son will gladly dump anything they don’t want to carry in it, but neither one of them will touch it or (gasp) actually take anything out of it. If they’re with me and my purse when I die, the conversation will go something like this:

“Is she having convulsions? Shouldn’t we call someone?”

“Yes, we should, but my phone is in her purse.”

“Oh no. So is mine.”

“Where is her phone?”

“In her purse.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes. Bad. You have to get it.”

“I’m not going in her purse. You get it.”

And so the conversation will continue while I flop around and expire, because they both sincerely believe they will contract some horrible form of eye herpes if they touch the interior of my purse. Somehow, this hideous disease doesn’t infect all the things they put into the purse, it just leaps onto their hands if they try to retrieve anything.

One tip for the road: if you happen to be carrying your husband’s wallet in your purse and you’re in a truck stop, do not refer to the purse, even jokingly, as his. This may or may not have happened to me, and my husband may or may not have been unfairly judged for using a purse in the Love’s because of my little joke. (We’ve gotten past that and now when we talk about it we laugh and laugh. Well, I laugh and laugh, it’s still a little soon for him.)