Even before the big trip on an airplane (an airplane!) the goodies arrived.  Folded up travel bags emblazoned with the airline logo, yours to use and keep. Meals on the plane Friends came out to the tarmac to see you off.

Before we moved to East Pakistan after sixth grade, I got my own light blue rectangular suitcase to lug around.  It was of indeterminate material—reinforced cardboard? —with a smooth fabric lining and elasticized pouch inside the lid with little straps to hold the clothes.  Skyways brand? There were small keys that fit into the two metal latches, not that it would be hard to pick the lock.  That suitcase followed me half my life, long after it was obsolete, across countries and continents and into attics and basements and yet, inexplicably, I never lost those little keys.

My high school hiking buddy introduced me to backpacks.  Kelty was supposedly the best—ergonomically designed to carry weight above the head, a waist belt, lightweight.  I eventually splurged and bought one, hoisting my home in my hand (tent, sleeping bag, camp kit and stove, clothes, necessities) from Atlantic to Pacific and into the high Sierra one summer after college.  How did I do that?  It is remarkable how you really could carry everything you needed.  I never felt so strong and self-sufficient again.

Years later, a three-month budget trip through Africa with Sally was packed into an Eagle Creek soft-sided suitcase with a new twist—hidden straps that could be unzipped from the exterior to convert it into a backpack.  And attachable day pack. How clever!  We carried photographic equipment with SLR, zoom lens, Polaroid, film and X-ray-proof bag, malaria medication and first aid kit, a library of guides and maps and a thick parasitology book.  Oh yes, some clothes. No idea how it worked, but youth had something to do with it.

Then, many millennia after the invention of the wheel, the petrochemical plastics industry figured out how to integrate them into a suitcase.  Wary of rough roads and harbouring illusions of more adventurous trips, we invested in soft-sided suitcases that boasted both convertible backpack straps AND wheels. When it became evident that we never used the backpack feature, the world had gotten more accessible-friendly, and/or our lives had become more prosaic, we caved and joined everyone else with plain old wheeled suitcases.

In the past twenty years a new generation has known nothing except increased security measures, communication advances, pandemics, population growth and migration, world development,  travel industrialization and climate change. Have smartphone, will travel.

I nostalgically hold onto the little leather toiletries case my mother used in the 1940’s, now repurposed into a jewelry box.  Each day, as I open the tattered lid still covered with travel stickers from the last century, I touch a bit of history before it all changed.

It is remarkable how you really could carry everything you needed.