We were standing in the airport waiting to check our one suitcase for our evening flight. It was just Slappy and me, enveloped in our own world, our own conversation. Somehow the conversation turned to how old our luggage is, and how there are almost no pieces that don’t have broken wheels or missing handles.

Slappy looked over our suitcase for a moment, examining whether it would survive this trip and all the things I’d smashed inside. After a moment he turned to me and asked why I didn’t cut the bundle of red and white yarn off the handle.

I sucked in a small breath of air.

“I can’t cut it.” I said, quietly.

“Why? It looks silly.” He replied.

I didn’t know how to respond. I thought for a moment and then I told him about the yarn.

That suitcase was the largest piece in a set my grandmother gave to me for my high school graduation. She had given all of her grandchildren luggage for that benchmark celebration, but each of us got something different. My sister’s was floral patterned, which made it easy to find at an airport, but mine was plain green.

It fit my personality, I thought.

And because mine was so plain, so simple, my grandmother tied red and white yarn to the handles of each of the 3 pieces so that I would be able to recognize them at the baggage claim. At the time, I thought it was silly, too. But I left it there at my grandma’s insistence.

My grandma passed away suddenly the following spring.

Since then, those suitcases have been to Hawaii, to Greece, to Spain, to New York, to Chicago, to Louisiana and the red and white yarn has gone with me each time. And though it seems silly, every time I see that yarn, I think of her. I feel like she’s here. Like she’s safeguarding me.

Like those wisps of red and white yarn are a very small piece of the grandmother I loved, the whimsical hearted woman who would’ve loved to go on so many far off adventures.

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