X: Backpack
How long have we been carrying burdens on our back?
Good morning. Today is décadi, the 20th of Fructidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate l'hotte, a noun that used to refer to harvesting baskets that are carried on one's back.
My kids have a very generous grandmother who buys them a fresh new backpack at the start of each school year. This is unnecessary, but sweet, and it means they have accumulated an accidental collection of school bags over the years, and I've had a strongly enforced view of the year-to-year evolution of their school equipment. Each grade has its own physical burdens, and in my mind, I see a distinct backpack for each.
At first, the backpack is a sort of pre-trash can, a place where crayons and semi-completed art projects go to be carried home, only to remain inside the largely decorative backpack to rot all year. Lunch boxes take up less and less of a percentage of space as they start checking out library books and needing a traditional school supply or two. In third grade, now, the school-issued laptop or tablet appears and remains, getting heavier or lighter depending on how much funding the school has acquired in its electronic education budget.
For my kids, there were two years where the backpack went nowhere at all, slouched in a hallway for pandemic schooling, filling up mainly with stuffed animals that "needed" to be carted to the grocery store on an errand run.
My oldest started middle school this year, and now the backpack has a second home, in a locker full of textbooks and hastily passed notes and stickers and spare sweaters. What was once a true bindle, carrying all her worldly education possessions, it is now a true pack basket, harvesting homework from the fields and carting it home for our dissection and consumption.
I may not know exactly how my kids will turn out through the coming tumultuous teenage years, but I can pretty solidly predict what will happen to their backpacks through college and beyond. They will become even heavier and more laden with costly electronics, house keys, cute miniature purses, tampons, spare shoes, sunglasses ... at some point, the backpack transforms from an accessory of work into an accessory of play, mainly used for hiking and music festivals, until morphing into whatever shoulder bag or briefcase or travel roller they need in their jobs to do whatever passes for a commute in the future.
When I took my latest day job, in the middle of the pandemic on a permanently work-from-home basis, they sent me a welcome kit that was clearly crafted before the offices shut down – a bag that can be a carry-on or a backpack depending on how you arrange the straps, and built with all sorts of clever pockets for laptops and phones and chargers and toiletries.
Those who make you work often expect you to place the load on your back. It seems like an old and fading idea – back-breaking work, hauling sheaves of wheat in from the harvest – but we're still out here, backpacking through life with anything that will connect us to work at home, and to home when out in the great elsewhere.
Today's card: Ace of diamonds
We had been stuck in a bit of a rut, even though things were going our way in every important sense, so this challenge to our way of doing things feels at first like a dangerous battle that must be fought with everything we have. However, if we open our minds to something new, we may have an opportunity to do things differently and discover a new source of strength or income as a result. Also, how cool is it to end on Pikes Peak? We'll start our final reading of the year tomorrow!
