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 ba

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