Mother Scent

 I wonder if I’ll smell like my mother when I get older.

I’m cat-sitting for her while she’s at the beach with my brother and sister-in-law this week. One of the perks of taking on this responsibility is that I get to do my laundry in her nice machine instead of the aging and unreliable ones at my apartment building.

Another perk is experiencing my mother’s personality through her belongings while she’s away. One can surmise a great deal about a person via their kitchen utensils, pantry contents and personal grooming implements. For example, my mom left out an old-fashioned rubber ice bag for me because she knew I was having some back pain before she left. Who uses anything other than frozen vegetable bags for icing sore joints these days?

She also seems to be hoarding soap. There are stacks of wrapped bars on a shelf in the bathroom, still more in a closet. Old-fashioned brand names like Fels-Naptha are unfamiliar to me, but the aroma in my mother’s bathroom is as familiar as my own.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother’s smell. Sitting on hard wooden pews in church, I often fell asleep against her cool arm. Her delicate scent soothed my bored and frustrated child’s temper. I hated having to sit still and endure Catholic masses and often resorted to misbehaving with my older brother. Mom would sit between us to keep us separated, and I inevitably drifted off during the priest’s long-winded sermons.

Mom didn’t smell like perfume — she eschewed cologne and makeup, as do I now. Rather, her skin smelled sweetly natural, slightly musky and cool.

I sometimes get a whiff of that same scent on my own skin, especially after exercising and first thing in the morning before showering. I’ll press my nose to my wrist or forearm and inhale deeply. My olfactory sense recognizes my maternal beginnings in that inhalation; my lizard brain awakens to its primordial importance.

Mom’s bathroom smells exactly like my grandmother’s bathroom smelled all those years ago, when Grandma lived in a double-wide trailer in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. I recognized it immediately when I came to Mom’s condo this week. Without her physical presence here, her scent seemed stronger, more present than when she is present herself.

Those memories of breathing in her aroma at church sprang forth in my mind’s eye alongside memories of her mother, of sleeping on Grandma’s floor with my brothers, of awaking to midnight thunderstorms and going to the kitchen to watch the lighting display with Mom and Grandma while the others slept undisturbed and uninterested.

Mom’s birthday is in a couple weeks. She’ll be 81. I consider her one of my closest friends, something I couldn’t imaging when I was a rebellious teenager and impatient young woman. In those years, I wanted desperately to separate myself from her and my dad, to create a self that was entirely unique and unconnected to my lineage.

I am finally at the age where I see the folly in such youthful aspirations. I no longer cringe when someone notes my physical resemblance to my mother. I feel acutely the tumbling forward of time that leads to her eventual death, and I embrace anything I can do to savor the time we have left together.

Spending time in her home while she’s away feels like getting a glimpse inside her mind — as well as a fleeting visit to my childhood.

As I write these words, a thunderstorm erupts. Like the familiar scent, these sounds bring memories to life: the tiny kitchenette at Grandma’s trailer, the excitement of being awake in the middle of the night, the feeling of community with the women in my family, a deep sense of safety and belonging.

I wonder if anyone will notice that I sometimes smell just like my mother. Having no children of my own, I wonder if one day my nieces will come to clean out my left-behind belongings and mention to each other that my place smells just like their grandmother’s place did.