The Purse

When you come home from a vacation it’s always great to be home – no more living from a suitcase, no more hot crowded train stations/airports/buses/sidewalks, no more weird food purchased for too much money that your kids take one bite from and then push aside, no more standing on a street corner with a map and a puzzled look. Instead you are back on familiar ground, somewhere where you know the fastest way to get across town, where the water tastes good for a change and not like it has been sitting in someone’s abandoned tennis shoes for a week then filtered through their socks into a plastic bottle. Back where you know exactly what foods your kids will eat. But most importantly, most significantly perhaps, you are back where it is no longer necessary to carry in your purse the following items:   a bag of dried fruit, a camera, spare batteries, a map, a guide book, a bottle of tennis shoe water, a paper napkin with a leftover bun from breakfast just in case, a doll, a bar of chocolate (melted), gum, a (by now) dog-eared postcard complete with stamp that was meant to be mailed 10 days ago but whatever, 16 brochures from various attractions/museums/cathedrals/etc that you have somehow acquired, a sticky popsicle wrapper, a roll of toilet paper,hop-on hop-off bus tickets, 4 sets of headphones for said bus trip, a colouring book, 3 broken pencils, 12 pounds of foreign coins, a bottle of tylenol, a bird feather the significance of which has since been forgotten, hand sanitizer, a rock, bandaids, a large bottle of sunscreen, 3 hats, and, perhaps most perplexingly, a 6inch long eraser that weighs at least a pound and has written on it ‘I made a really big mistake in Blodford-Splatting!’.

So I guess now that I’m home and my purse weighs 20 pounds less, I’m a little happier about carrying it around, but I miss some of that stuff as it meant I was somewhere else, not on my way to work, or the bank, and that I would probably see something that day that I hadn’t seen before. I even kinda miss that eraser.

Until next time…