A letter from a reader

At 63, I had carried my sheets to the church retreat in a trash bag for thirty-one years

The only thing I wrote all last weekend was PEGGY on a sticky name tag at the check-in table, and I ran out of room before I got to the Y. I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman how she ought to keep her house.

But three different women asked me about my laundry basket at our church women's retreat out at Lake O' the Pines, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

Every October for thirty-one years, the ladies from our church have driven up to a little church camp in the pines near Avinger for three days of devotions, crafts and somebody else's cooking. You bring your own sheets and towels for the bunkhouse. And every October for thirty-one years, I have brought mine in a black trash bag.

This year my daughter came by the night before to drop off a casserole dish, and she watched me knot the top of the bag on the kitchen floor, and she said it.

Mama, you pack for that retreat like you are being evicted.

I laughed, and then I looked at it properly, and she was not wrong. A lumpy black bag with my good pillow crushed into one end of it, the same thing I take the leaves out to the curb in. I had stopped seeing it years ago. I had a feeling everybody else had not.

I did not choose the trash bag. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody sits down and decides that is how she will carry her things. It happens one rushed Thursday night at a time, until your daughter says it out loud on your own kitchen floor.

How it happens

I used to be particular about this sort of thing. When Frank and I were first married I had a set of matching towels I would not let anybody use but company.

What changed was not me. It was what they sell us to carry things in.

Go and look. You get two choices. A plastic basket that cracks at the handles and rattles around the trunk like a shopping cart. Or a trash bag, because at least a trash bag squashes into the corner of the car and nobody has to look at it.

So you do what I did. You buy whatever is cheap and it is fine. Then you spend thirty years carrying the nicest things you own, your clean sheets, your good pillow, in something you would be embarrassed to set down in front of anybody. Nobody says anything, because women at church are kind. That is the trouble.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought I had to pick. Either it was practical or it was pretty, and a laundry basket was never going to be the pretty kind, so practical it was.

It turns out that was never the choice.

My daughter showed me. Before she left that night she pulled up a picture on her phone of the basket that sits by her own tub in Belton, full of the grandkids' towels, a soft quilted thing in honey gold with a big bee on it. She said, Mama, it stands up by itself and it has handles. Take that up the hill instead. I ordered mine that evening, before I had even put the casserole dish away.

The basket is called the Honey

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly looking after women our age for a few years now.

The basket is called the Honey. A soft quilted basket in a warm honey gold that fades down to a light tan at the bottom, quilted all over in little honeycomb shapes, with one big bee flying across the front and white daisies growing up around the bottom. The picture goes all the way around, so there is no wrong way to set it down.

It stands up on its own, empty or full, which sounds like nothing until you have spent thirty years holding a bag open with your knee. It has two tall, soft handles, one on each side, so you can carry it in front of you with both hands. It is light. And when you are done with it, it folds down flat.

Nothing complicated about any of it. Just a basket where somebody remembered that the things you carry around in it are your own nice things.

What happened at the retreat

I packed it Thursday night with a set of sheets, two towels and my pillow on top, and it rode the whole way up from Austin standing straight up in the back of the car. When we got to camp I carried it up the hill to the bunkhouse in one trip, by the two handles, while everybody else was going back down for the second load.

The first woman asked me about it before I had my sheets on, from the bunk underneath mine. The second was a young mother on her very first retreat, at the bathhouse sinks Saturday morning, who wanted to know if it came in anything with chickens on it. And then there was Oleta.

Oleta has run the check-in table at that camp for twenty-five years, and in all that time she has never said one word to me except which bunkhouse I am in. She looked at it over the top of her clipboard on Sunday as we were loading up, and said, Peggy, that is the first thing anybody has carried up that hill that looked like it meant to stay. From Oleta, that is a love letter.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I did not spend the weekend shoving anything under the bed. It sat out at the foot of my bunk the whole three days, and on the porch in the mornings with my towel in it, and I did not think about it once.

When I got home Sunday night I did not put it away. It sits at the foot of our bed now with the clean towels in it, and Frank has started putting his folded undershirts in there too, which I am told is how a man says thank you. That is the rarest sort of basket. The one that does the hauling, and still looks like it belongs in the bedroom.

Three things I have learned since

One. Standing up on its own matters more than you think. It keeps its shape whether it is full or half empty, so filling it is a one-handed job, and it does not fold over on itself in the back of the car or the corner of the room.

Two. The handles change where it goes. They are tall enough to get both hands round and carry it out in front of you, up a hill, down a hallway, or from the dryer to the bed. A trash bag never once did that for me.

Three. Pick your size. The small is 14 by 18 inches and is lovely in a bathroom. The medium is 16 by 22, which is the one I took, and it held a full set of sheets, two towels and a pillow. The large is 20 by 28, for a family's worth of laundry or all the spare bedding. I would measure the spot before you order.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Honey is $54.95 for the small. It was $110.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have seen quilted things at the craft fair with half the work in them go for a great deal more than that.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on right now.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman from Daingerfield had written, “I keep the extra quilts in mine at the foot of the guest bed. Everybody who stays over asks where I found the bee.”

Then I ordered a second one for my daughter, because she had sent me to it in the first place. She took the bee as well. They do over forty other designs, so I will be going back.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting out on the bunkhouse porch with our coffee before the morning devotion, with the mist still on the lake, this is what I would say.

If you have been carrying your nice things around in something you would rather nobody saw, a cracked plastic basket, a grocery sack, a trash bag knotted at the top, and you have quietly decided that is just how it is, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a laundry basket will change your life. It will not. But there is something in picking up your own things and not wanting to hide them that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on right now, and the medium is the size most of the women at the retreat went for, so I would not leave it too long. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

The trash bags are back under the kitchen sink where they belong. Next October I am bringing the bee.

Peggy