Many groups traveling together, like mission trip teams, will agree upon a distinctive tag for their luggage, so that when it comes through baggage claim, all of the team’s luggage can be easily retrieved and kept together.

On past trips, a team member has made such tags, but this time, with a large group and short time, we simply agreed on a common color and suggested something made of yarn (some people are doing little pompoms or what have you).

My mother knitted me little luggage tag-shaped rectangles to put on my two checked bags. I picked them up from her Monday night when I was over at my parents’ house. I realized yesterday that I didn’t remember what I ever did with them. I scoured my house and my car in and out, or so I thought, without success. I felt terrible — my mother had gone to the trouble of making these things for me, and here I had misplaced them weeks before the actual trip.

I found them just now. On Monday, I had gone straight from my parents’ house to the supermarket, and I tucked the tags into one of my cloth shopping bags for (ha!) safekeeping. The funny thing is, I thought of this as a possibility yesterday and thought I had looked through all of my cloth shopping bags. But I either missed one or didn’t look closely enough. When I looked again just now, there were the tags. I am so relieved to find them.