The Memory of Scents - A Birthday Tribute to My Mom

       I can still smell my mom's grapefruit glycerin soap and banana conditioner from The Body Shop, an addiction since I discovered it pre-U.S. expansion days in Covent Garden with my dad. The bright fruit scents, one crispy and tangy like our grapefruit trees in our Phoenix backyard, the other creamy and comforting like her Joy of Cooking banana bread make my mouth water and my eyes follow suit.
     I've always had a strong sense of smell, a bi-product of an anxious personality according to Dr. Oz. But it's also my way of cataloging memories. I remember my mom in scents.
     I remember the pungent, smack the nose smell of her oil paints before she switched over to watercolors. They had a more plastic, acrylic smell like my crayons melting on the dash of my grandfather's Buick on the way from Oregon to Arizona. She smelled creative, a work in progress. Sometimes she changed it up and the smell changed to a more earthy, wet clay smell ground into her pores and under her fingernails as she scraped and molded a relief of my fourteen year old face, hair curled under my chin, shades of the Princess Cruise ship logo.
     Sometimes she smelled like sweat and Pinesol, cleaning house religiously on a Saturday morning. She'd not so subtly bang the door of my room with the vacuum cleaner until I got up to help, the acrid, eye-stinging scent of white vinegar burning my nostrils as I was directed to finish cleaning the bathrooms. My reward being a trip to the mall for lunch and window-shopping, the delicious smells of grilled cheese and generous portions of chocolate milkshakes replacing the early morning elbow grease smell.
     Her poor, gnarled feet ridged with hard white lines like small mountain ranges smelt like peppermint foot lotion. I worked and willed my fingers to rub her Payless-pumps damaged toes spreading large dollops of the Christmas candy scented lotion tingling my nose and hands. I rubbed hard half-horrified, half-helpless that her poor feet were calloused and thick-skinned from endless hours of menial, secretarial duties to feed and provide for me.
     When I grew up and our roles began to shift and morph from child and mother to a more even footing of friend and companion, new smells took over. The salt tang of the Pacific Ocean particularly pungent with fish and sea-bird droppings at our favorite morning jaunt around La Jolla Cove. Or the smell of diesel fuel and worn fabric seats on the train from Phoenix to Orland with fragrant stops in San Antonio (dusty museum smell of the Alamo, Mexican food, margaritas, and musty water of the Riverwalk) and New Orleans (cinnamon sugar of beignettes, spicy blackened Creole cooking, the stale beer smell of bars on Bourbon St. and the humidity and moss smell of old plantations).
     We accumulated so many more smells, an olfactory encyclopedia of mother-daughter adventures up the Pacific Coast Highway, across the Canadian Rockies, Dublin, London, Paris, Prague, Vienna, and so many more, So many photo-commemorated travels, I also associate her with the vinyl, plastic smell of photo album pockets.
     Now that she's gone, I spritz her spirit, corporealizing her into being with a spray of her Inis perfume from Dublin on my wrists, the banana conditioner in my hair, and peppermint foot lotion tingling my softer feet than hers, a sign my life was easier because of her sacrificies.
     They make me smell the salt tears I rapidly blink back, the bridge of my nose stinging as the emotions fill behind my eyes, and I work to tamp down the flood that tentatively waits behind a dam of schooled, long-practiced will power. But I need those memories still clinging to me, entering my pores, finding the 23 genes I inherited from her reminding me that I am half of her. Whispering in my ear with the whiff of memory that I still carry her with me even if it's still not quite the same, not quite enough to satisfy my broken heart. But enough to share the love she gave me with my boys. So I can wrap them in a hug that smells like it's from her.