I came home not too long ago to find this parked on our deck:

It seems that someone has been missing our Sydney Nanna Trolley and decided to take matters into her own hands, borrowing one from our local QFC. I meant to blog about the Nanna Trolley when we were living in Oz and surprisingly never got around to it despite the central role it played in our lives there. It is most definitely the one item (besides Miss Tilly) that we wish we had not left behind.

We discovered the Nanna Trolley on our first weekend in Sydney. Neighbor Cynthia had invited us to go shopping with her at the local Saturday market. As Gina and I headed for the staircase that would take us down into the market, Neighbor Cynthia headed for the handicap ramp, turning lazy, endless corners with the Nanna Trolley in tow until she reached the bottom several minutes later. This, at first, made us doubt the value of the Nanna Trolley, as well as understand why it was named after grandma. But an hour or two later, all shopped out and heading for the exit, we started to understand the true value of the Nanna Trolley, Neighbor Cynthia’s now fully laden with organic yogurt and fresh flowers, packed to overflow like Santa’s sleigh at Christmas, what would have been a difficult haul to the car parked several blocks away reduced to an insignificant tow along the pavements.

It wasn’t long after this, after our car-free lives really started to settle into the routine of walking everywhere, including home from the supermarket with arms stretched to the limit by burdensome bags of groceries, that procuring a Nanna Trolley became Gina’s top priority. Going after what she wanted with her usual gusto meant that we were soon proud owners of our own Nanna, first cousin to Neighbor Cynthia’s, a slimming black to tote around with us on every errand. Gotta walk an hour’s return uphill to Bondi Junction for a bag of noodles and a box of Special K? Off went Gina with her Nanna. Gotta cart another load cross-town to the storage unit? Off went us both with the Nanna.

So why didn’t Nanna come home to the States with us? Well, that’s a question I try to avoid around here. When pressed to respond, which is more often than one would believe, I like to say it’s because I was burned out from spending too much time packing and repacking that darn storage unit that when the time came to get it all shipped out, I was no longer of sound mind and body and in so being thought it was an unnecessary item to add to the load. Who drags around a Nanna Trolley in Seattle? Gina likes to say it’s because I’m stubborn, which may very well be true, and that I owe her a new Nanna. In the meantime, she apparently plans to just borrow the Nanna’s closest stateside cousin from QFC.