It smells just like Sunday

The less my Mother remembers, the more I do. And the memories that were so painful yesterday aren’t so bad today. It’s a good thing or I’d be a basket case. It’s hard to stop the flow of memories once they start.  I know this is true because no matter how hard I try I cannot do it. Little things set them off, a word, a smell, a sound and off my minds goes on a vacation down memory lane. These memories  spark in the oddest places, today in the grocery store it was the smell of perfume. Chanel No. 5 to be exact. Just a lingering smell left in an aisle by a wandering customer who will never know that her perfume took me back to Sunday mornings of my childhood. Waiting to go to church, everyone’s ready. My brother and father in their matching powder blue leisure suits, me in my over ruffled dress, hair in thick sausage curls, toes pinched by black patent leather shoes with stupid bows and buckles. We’d gather by the door to the garage and wait …and wait … and wait and finally Mom would come down in a cloud of Aqua Net  thick enough to make our noses plug, with an underlying smell so familiar to me that I can imagine it right now. Mom’s perfume, special for Sundays and other important occasions.  Then before my mind and nose could process it she’d rush us out the door and into the station wagon and off we’d go. Late for church as always.

We’d drive up Wood Road, onto the Ridge and arrive just as the opening processional started. The Robinsons, late as usual. Arriving in a sea of blue and pink, all of us smelling like Mom’s Chanel No. 5 as we snuck down the aisle behind the choir.

In HS my brother got the station wagon and he’d load it up with all of us and off we’d go to basketball games, United Skates of America, midnight movies, and other teen activities.  The wagon full of teenagers, rock music blaring on the 8 Track, perhaps a warm beer or twelve stolen from someone’s Dad’s garage. Old Spice, Love’s Baby Soft, hair spray and other teenage smells clogging the air. After we’d drop everyone off and head home the car would be empty except for my brother and me and the lingering light smell of Mom’s Sunday perfume. No matter how long we drove or what we did that scent always remained like a ghost just hovering and doomed to be there forever.

I have a few of Mom’s things in my bedroom. A jewelry box, a memory box and an empty bottle of Chanel No. 5. Sometimes when I’m dusting or cleaning or just feeling little I open the bottle and sniff and am instantly back in my god awful black patent leather shoes, hair in thick curls, frills out the wazoo, sitting on the bottom step in our old house waiting for Mom to hurry the hell up so we won’t be late for church again. A second sniff and in my mind she rushes past in her Sunday best, smelling just like Sundays should always smell. Smelling just like today smells.