Love and Loss at the Unclaimed Baggage Center

At Racked, Stephie Grob Plante muses on the melancholy-yet-hopeful experience of shopping at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, a family-run business that sells items from lost luggage that was never reunited with its owner:

So here I am, in Alabama, at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, overcome with wanting to know: when I lost, what did I find? There’s no way that pre-July me, a perpetual pessimist, could stand in a store full of strangers’ lost things and fixate so hard on how fortunate those who find these treasures are.

What do we find when we lose?

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Katie O'Brien is an English major at Cornell University, where she writes for kitsch magazine, DJs for a rock station, and complains about the cold. Find her on Twitter @abluekite.

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