Week 11:54

Green and beige, there was nothing outstanding about this handbag we got as a free promotion, few years prior. There were hundreds exactly alike which must be the explanation why an anonymous traveler in Heathrow airport took it on his way to Ireland, and left us his.

Sure that the misunderstanding will be resolved in no time we left his bag in the lost and found desk and boarded our planned flight to Boston.

I believe the key word here was ‘planned,’

We landed in Boston late on September 10^th 2001 and drove to Chucks’ parents’ home in Connecticut. Pleased that the long flight, following the long-drawn-out weeks of closing our house after more than twenty years, had came to an end, we were set and eager to start the next chapter of our journey.

And then we woke up the next morning to September 11^th.

I am ashamed to say that the first immediate thought in my mind, through all that chaos, was “we’ll never see that bag again.”

But life must go on and we continued with our plans.

We purchased a car and the provisions needed for the long trip ahead, left instructions to send the bag after us, and left.

Traveling across the US, heading west – was our one and only plan.

It was exciting, every day welcomed us with new places and new faces and every evening we called to find out about the whereabouts of the lost bag just to learn that it did not show up and that no one knows when, and if, it will.

Somewhat frustrated we engaged ourselves in a new game called “and what was in the bag?”

Surprisingly each one of us remembered different items; I remembered my hiking boots and some pictures,  my husband was sure he packed some valuable papers and his hat and Keren missed one of her teddy bears. Only Tal, whom we picked already in the US, was completely indifferent to the missing bag saga and thought there were other things, more significant, to deal with, like where are we going to spend the winter, already breathing down our necks.

One week, two weeks, three, we crossed the vast plains of the Dakotas, the badlands, climbed into the high plains of Montana and still no sign of where we’re heading, where we’re going to spend our new life.

Our thoughts about embarking blindly into journeys and leaving our predictable and  well known life in Israel behind, inevitably ended with contemplating how the lost bag is going to find us if we ourselves don’t know where we’re heading?

By the end of October, one late afternoon (still no bag in sight) we stood at the Fourth of July Pass, overlooking the town of Coeur d’Alene. It could have been pure exhaustion or the fact that the setting sun illuminated the lake with its last rays that we finally saw, with new clarity that we have arrived.

It took few more months and then one day ‘out of the blue’ a green and beige bag landed on our front door. By then we had exhausted the “what’s in the bag “guessing game and got immersed in our new life.

We looked at the bag, now dusty looking and slightly torn, pulled at the many tags and stickers marking its long journey trying to follow us and felt a tug of homesickness. Will it be the hiking boots; the supposedly vital documents a smiling teddy bear? For some reason now that the moment had come, it was not important at all.