Victory Bags

I filched my mother’s knitting bag when I was a sophomore in high school. It was in the back of her closet along with her black-and-white spectator shoes and a below-the-knee wool plaid skirt. (I swiped those, too.) The bag was made of upholstery material and had a lovely set of hardwood handles—perfect to carry my schoolbooks in. Mom had kept these since her college days in the early 1940s, when she was a student on campus devoid of men, absent due to their active military service in Europe.