a week tomorrow

we will be on the road to Santa Fe, with the cats. The kitchen window sill points in that direction, with two Acoma Pueblo pottery cats, and one rather crinkled red chile. I was speculating the other day that one reason I'm good at getting packed and being on the road is that I so, so looked forward to going on vacation as a child. Admittedly this was usually somewhere damp and mountainous (the Lake District, mid Wales), where my father would point our car down roads that read Unpassable for Motors (probably the root of my intrepid traveling characteristics), and my mother would make sardines sandwiches for us to eat on long wet hikes, huddled in the shelter of a dry stone wall with some equally miserable sheep. But it was Away, and so I would take the little leather attache case that used to be my mother's high school case, and make sure that it had in it essentials, like a drawing book and pencils, and a couple of books (a new Ruby Ferguson, perhaps, like Jill Enjoys Her Ponies - it was only recently that I found out that the Armada editions of her novels, which I read, were apparently abridged ones; maybe an Agatha Christie); a notebook for the Holiday Journal, and a plastic pony or two. I'm not sure that my essential packing is all that different now...