Well, my grandmother’s funeral is over. We emptied her closet of the clothes she’ll no longer need and that we don’t want. We donated them to a place she loved. A friend was working at the donation place on a day she doesn’t normally work. That felt right. I wanted to hand these clothes over to someone I knew, someone who would tell me how nice it would be to have them, someone who remembered my grandmother.

I’ve flown to Florida so many times in the past three months that I know the gate folks. I even know the security folks at the Melbourne, Florida airport, and they are far nicer than any other security folks I’ve met.

At BWI, I was somehow seen as a threat and flagged by the airline to be screened.

They placed me and O in a pen where O said, “this is fun, mama!” She liked the swinging glass doors. We played pat-a-cake and sang songs while waiting for the guard to get around to screening us.

I got a pat down.

Then, the male guard had to swipe all of my luggage with a dirty looking cloth.

He said, “which pieces are yours?”

I said, “this, this, this, this, this and this.”

He said, “who else is traveling with you?”

I pointed to O, who smiled broadly.

He said, “wow.”

I said, “that’s traveling with a toddler for ya.”

This is how I did it. I wore the toddler on my back. I carried a 35-lb car seat in one arm. I held a rolling suitcase with a small gym bag on top of it in the other.

We did fine until I had to take off our shoes (O’s and mine), remove the laptop from the suitcase, extract baggies of liquids for inspection — the $6 suntain lotion deemed a threat and thrown away — remove toddler from back, remove baby carrier from back and keep toddler from running through the checkpoint without me.

Someone gave me a cart to use. In all the commotion, I forgot it and hauled the 100 lbs worth of stuff down to the gate.

Miracles! The flight attendant picked up my car seat and put it into the window seat. I got it strapped in and we got all of our bags settled.

Then came a voice: “I think you’re in my seat.”

The flight attendant put O’s car seat in the wrong seat.

The woman whose seat we’d taken by accident said, “aren’t you the one that got the extra screening and now this?”

Yes, yes, that was me.

When I got on the flight to come home, the flight attendants said, “nice to have you back.” Did I detect any sarcasm? I don’t know.