Ready. Or Not.

It is time for me to start packing for our cruise through Vietnam and Cambodia. 

As a kid, when our mammoth family would take trips we could take only a small bag.  I would arrive with a garbage sack containing a mustard-stained shirt and no pants. 

So there I would be in my dirty shirt and no pants and Mom would say go change and I would say to what then Mom would say JUST BORROW SOMETHING FROM DOROTHY. My mom gave birth to Dorothy so I know they’ve met but you wouldn’t know it by that suggestion. 

Dorothy was neat. Dorothy was accessorized. Dorothy was..NOT going to lend me her clothes. But I was crafty enough to have been born after her so I was always the beneficiary of her perfect hand-me-downs. 

So call it nostalgia but I buy a lot of clothes from consignment stores and I still pack light for trips. My clothes do double duty—shoes can change an outfit from daywear to dinner-wear. A scarf is essential because it can double as a skirt or a jacket and when I’m traveling with my sister, Marsha, it can act as a tourniquet or a sling. 

I sometimes still use a garbage bag as a suitcase which is how my “luggage” became part and parcel to the Taos County landfill this fall. I’ll save you the asking. It was The Husband. 

I had to replace all of my old favorite clothes with NEW, and once I’d had a taste of shopping NEW I was like a coyote in a chicken yard. 

Amazon. Am I right?

In my frenzy I ordered some new pajamas to replace the perfectly good ones I got for Christmas ‘97, but I received only the top. Harkening back to those days of packing pantless, I thought about just getting by with the top. But then I thought, no. NO. 

With the right scarf, my old pajama bottoms will double nicely as evening wear. 

Wheels up in a few days, ready or not.