So I get to blog about style for Wanderlust and Lipstick. And, even better, I’m co-blogging with one of my dearest friends, Erin Tolman. I’m a lucky girl.
Allow me to introduce myself. That’s me in the photo above, near the famed stained glass ceiling of Barcelona’s Palau de la Musica Catalana, just before the stage exploded in flamenco. That indestructible dress I’m wearing served me well on my trip. Plus it was a gift from my poet friend Esther. And who can resist stripes and birds?
I have a copy of a different photo near my desk at work: I’m six years old and sound asleep in my mother’s pink suitcase. I’m wearing the bottom half of Wonder Woman Underoos, and a sleeveless tee with pastel stripes.
When we’d visit The Florida House, my grandparents’ place near Sarasota, I loved going to the beach every morning with my parents. I treasured my terry cloth turban-and-bathrobe combo after I showered off the sand and sat down for my cheese sandwich.
But I hated naps. One afternoon I was tired of lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, wasting the perfectly good daylight hours when I could be turning cartwheels on the bristly grass outside. I thought, sizing up the nearby suitcase, that if I had to be still, I would prefer to be still on socks.
The suitcase was my mother’s pink suitcase, part of the set she took on her honeymoon at Myrtle Beach. If you poke around the case’s blue quilted lining, you might still find grains of rice. (The English major in me can’t help but Go There with mother’s pink suitcase as a womb image. And would this make me, say, a sweatshirt born of my mother’s suitcase? Or would I be more of the matching pink overnight bag, a boxier mini-me of my mother but one with a mirror sewn in its lid?).
The photo is a Venn diagram for several of my loves: Mom (the pretty suitcase who gave me life!), napping ( I finally got the hang of it!), travel, and clothes. And, lately, nostalgia for childhood, the sepia tones of memory.
“The Journey of Life,” my mom wrote below the photo in her large, left-leaning script. She told me, “we should have known you’d be a traveler.”