Megan Whitfield Facebook ad: “Four sisters. One bad packing habit.”

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Every Christmas four sisters unzip four suitcases in my mother’s guest room, and all four of us pull out the same sandwich bag. Not the same one. Four of them, one each, our jewelry for the week knotted up inside, because that’s how my mother packed hers and nobody ever questioned it. My mother lives in Mesa, Arizona, in the house we grew up in. I’m the oldest of the four and I live in Henderson, Nevada, which is four and a half hours away if nobody needs to stop, and somebody always needs to stop. Vero drives in from Albuquerque, Lety comes up from Tucson, and Gabi, the baby, rides down with me from Las Vegas most years. The guest room is where the suitcases go, four of them open on the floor the way it’s been since we were coming home from college, and we get dressed in there like it’s a locker room. I own a dog-grooming salon. My hands are in a tub most of the day, so no rings at work, no watch, and a necklace on a groomer is something a nervous Doodle gets a paw through. So everything I own that I can’t wear at work goes to Mesa with me. Two necklaces, my studs, my hoops, three rings, and the watch my son gave me for Mother’s Day with money he says he earned. For twenty years, all of that has traveled in a sandwich bag, pressed into the corner of my suitcase next to my shoes. This is what the sandwich bag has cost me, as far as I can remember. Two necklaces that left Henderson in separate corners of the bag and arrived in Mesa as one necklace. Twenty minutes on the edge of the guest bed with a safety pin while everyone else was already eating. Earring backs. One per trip, like a toll. They go down into the seam where the bag folds and you don’t find them until you’re throwing the bag away. Last Christmas Eve I wore one stud and my hair down, and only Lety noticed. A scratch across the face of the watch in the exact shape of a ring, from four and a half hours in there together with nothing between them. And one ring I found in March, inside a sock, because the seal on the bag had opened somewhere around Kingman and the ring went looking for somewhere quieter. My mother’s version is more advanced. She wraps every piece in a paper napkin first, folds it into a little square, and then puts the squares in the sandwich bag. On Christmas Eve she sits on her bed and unwraps twelve napkins looking for her good earrings, and she will tell you this is the correct way. I have tried the other things. A zippered pouch, which is a sandwich bag you can’t see into, so the knot is a surprise. My mother’s napkins, for exactly one trip. One year I threaded all three rings onto one of the necklaces so they would at least get lost together. What finally got into my head, somewhere on the drive home last December, is that chains find each other when they have room to move, and a sandwich bag is nothing but room. Everything in there is loose in one space, sliding four and a half hours toward whatever it can wrap around. A nicer bag with the same room inside is the same bag. Gabi’s birthday is in October, and this year everyone went to Mom’s for it. So I went looking for a present that would give her jewelry nowhere to go. What I found was a jewelry case, not a box: a soft one, about the size of my hand, that zips shut and opens flat like a book. Gemmy, from Emmafy, if you want to look it up. Six soft pockets inside, each big enough for a necklace, and two small ones for studs, so every piece gets its own. Zip it shut and the two sides press together, pocket against pocket, and nothing in there has anywhere to go. The box came with two inside, and I’ll get to that. The first one never made it near the wrapping paper. I loaded it on my bed in Henderson that night, one piece per pocket. Two necklaces flat in their own pockets, studs and hoops in the two small ones, three rings in a row, the watch in the last one, and not a pocket left over. I zipped it, shook it like I was mad at it, and opened it flat on the bedspread. Everything was sitting where I’d put it. One thing it doesn’t do, and I found this out on my bedroom carpet: the pockets don’t close. Open it standing up and a ring slides right out onto the floor. Zipped, nothing moves. Open, you lay it flat first. Gabi got hers over enchiladas at my house the week before her birthday, with instructions. Friday night in Mesa, four suitcases open on the guest room floor. Vero pulled out her sandwich bag. Lety pulled out hers, already knotted, and held it up to the light like a question. Gabi unzipped a little case, opened it flat on the bed like a book, and every piece she owns was sitting in its seat. I unzipped mine next to it and kept my mouth shut. Lety, still holding her knot: “Where’d you get that?” Gabi tipped her head at me and said, “Ask Monica.” My mother was in the doorway with her napkins, looked at the two cases for a long time, then at the two sandwich bags, and said, “Mija.” That was all. My mother is not a woman who runs out of words. At the end of October Gabi flew to Denver for work and texted us a photo from the hotel bed, the case open flat, and under it two words: nothing moved. Christmas at my mother’s is coming. Four sisters, four suitcases, same floor. They’re still doing buy one, get one free, the way they were in October, and the first one out of that box went straight into my own suitcase. So Vero and Lety are getting theirs before we leave, and there is one for my mother, who is welcome to keep the napkins for the tamales. If there will be a sandwich bag of jewelry in your suitcase the week of Christmas, packed that way because that’s how it was packed for you. If you have ever sat on the edge of a bed in someone else’s house with a safety pin while the rest of your family ate without you. If you own exactly one earring back fewer than you own earrings, and you know which trip took it. This Christmas there will be four suitcases open on my mother’s floor and not one sandwich bag in any of them. The napkins are coming anyway. https://emmafy.com/pages/gemmy-lst9-gift-db-bliwjl

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emmafy.com

Four sisters. One bad packing habit.

Mom started it.