Synopsis:
This novel began as a short story, written for the new millennium.
There are two voices in this account of an apparently homeless 'bag lady'
The 1st is the listener who is accosted one morning in her local park by the 'bag lady'
Adopted as a young child and now happily married with children of her own she feels herself inexplicably drawn to this decrepit woman who carries her life in 2 laundry bags.
Listening to her story she begins to question her own origins. Could this woman be her birth mother? Or is she a figment of her imagination?
The 2nd ( italics) voice is that of the owner of the two striped bags who, 35 years earlier as a teenager she meets a young Jamaican her first encounter with a 'coloured' man. When she becomes pregnant her extremely straight-laced parents take her to a mother and baby home, where six weeks after giving birth she is forced to give the baby up for adoption. She refuses to return home with her parents and so begins her rootless existence and the habit of retaining bags, every one of which relates to a period of her life.