A backpack to keep

I was in class when I learned my grandmother, Oma, was approaching the end of her life. I left class in horror. Naturally, I was terribly sad for a night or two but I thought back to conversations with her when I was 15 years old, 14, 10. She was at peace with her life. She had an extensive history about her, children and grandchildren and she left many stories.

I’m not sentimental generally but I kept several of her things, if only because she was so practical that she would dread things gone to waste. Most of the things I kept were just neat, a dishtowel with a recipe on it from Tahiti that I have been meaning to try, a fallen apart book, a wall hanging covered in shells and sand from the beach near her home in Puerto Rico.

Some of the things were actually sentimental, like the quilts she made for me when I was young. They somehow ended up as wall hangings at one point but I insisted they were blankets because she made them small for a kid to wear. Others were not actual things but life advice, a yearning for an unconventional life and education, a mac and cheese recipe.

The very most important thing that I have was her backpack, some sort of German-branded thing that she took everywhere with her for many years, and now I take it everywhere with me. When I first moved out to Wyoming, I brought the backpack proudly because Oma hadn’t been out west much, but now the backpack has.

Simply because of who I am as a person, I feel stupid for valuing it for its material and nostalgia, but it really is one of the most valuable things I own. If I’m on a river, in the mountains, in a city, I look at it and remember why I was able to pick up and move to rural Wyoming. On both sides of my family, I come from a long line of loving but independent women—not that every woman was that way, but it seems like per generation there has been at least one. They’ve all been married and/or had children, but ended up in their situations somewhat differently.

My mom, for example, was a NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) adventurer in the 1970s, and I was named after the woman who escorted her to a hospital when she fell ill with a bleeding stomach ulcer when they were in remote Africa. After college, she worked in the Okefenoke Swamp in Georgia. She took my brother and me there when I was a kid, and I cried when I was surrounded by alligators and rough Southern accents. My brother rocked the boat to scare me.

Her mother, my maternal grandma, was a mathematician back when many women didn’t even go to college. That grandma raised four women who all have wonderful careers and stories, athletes and foresters-turned-flower farmers, teachers and my mom, a social worker.

My Oma stood out to me, though, because of the sheer amount of stories she had about traveling across the world while living on a tiny sailboat. She also managed to feed three boys over six feet tall on another small sailboat during their summers growing up. Oma ate an earthworm with the Aborigines in Australia and said it tasted like buttered corn. Opa wouldn’t try it. Every story ended with basically the same lesson—don’t ever think the way anyone lives is wrong. Don’t visit a place and judge. Visit and learn from them.

I wear the backpack in every day life, throw it in my passenger seat, functionally transport things in it but mostly I take it outdoors with me. Oma and I ended up on different journeys. She liked to meet new people more than me. She took the bag to markets where she surely talked to each vendor about the goods they offered and I take it far away from people.

I’m very worried I will rip it but Oma would find it ridiculous if I held on to it but never used it. Sentimentality aside, it really is a fantastic piece of equipment. She bought it sometime in the 80s and there are no holes or tears. I haven’t noticed any fraying, either. I would just patch it, anyway.