Travel Day's Eve

On the eve of every trip-return I’m newly amazed by what feats of compression you can perform to re-pack, since the minute you break the seal on your luggage its contents spill out everywhere. Five days ago I walked into this guest room with a rolling suitcase and a backpack and ten minutes later the place was festooned with my scattered belongings: a diary and an I-Pod on the night stand, a polka dot dress on the chair, another eight or ten articles of clothing in the closet. And more: the pastel corsage of underthings in the bureau and the two books on top of it; three magazines, two silly DVDs bought at the Winn Dixie in case of insomnia and a printout called “When Things Fall Apart” telling how that moment of utter befuddlement is the moment when you’re being given the gift of letting go.Letting go. What if I panic tomorrow at 4am and fail to stuff everything into that suitcase and backpack and thus end up without my nice soft PJs or my bright-blue metal travel mug? What if I get disoriented in these strange pitch-dark mornings and take a wrong turn in my rental car and land in the Gulf of Mexico? Or if my plane goes down like Tom Hanks’s did in Cast Away and I don’t even HAVE a soccer ball to draw a face on and make a friend of?These are things I never think of when I travel but I am thinking of them now.Here, there are palm trees and bright red birds. It was 85 and wild parakeets and butterflies dancing across the bright-green treetops. Tomorrow it will be 85 again here with more bright sunshine spilling on all this plumage. Back home it’s predicted to be in the mid-50s. Dirty mounds of snow loom in the shaded corners of parking lots and our meek robins are still just unpacking their own bags.