Scents and Sensibility

Yesterday I reached for my purse, hanging on its peg in the kitchen.  I was looking for my "list book."  I make lists.  All the time.  It's the only way I can keep track of the things I need to do, the things I need to buy, the things I want to write about, the things I want to remember.  The official measure of a nanosecond is the length of time between when I think of something I need to write down and when that thought vanishes from my brain.  Sometimes, even having a list is not enough to save me from my own distractedness.  If I don't write it down this instant, it's often gone for good.

So I reached for my purse as it hung there and began to rummage through it, hunting for the little spiral book I'm currently using until I've filled every blue-lined page with grocery items and projects and snippets of inspiration.  It's a kind of big purse, so I ended up sticking my face inside just a little bit to find the book where it lay in the very bottom-most part, and that's when it happened.  I caught the scent of my purse -- leather and Ricola and ink and paper and Blistex and scented handlotion -- and what flashed through my heart was, "Mom's purse!" In an instant I was transported back to the little bedroom in our little house, with the gold bedspread and the red carpet and the magical jewelry box on the simple dresser.

One of my favorite things to do was to sit on that satiny bedspread and watch with wonder while mom emptied her purse to change it out.  She had purses that matched her shoes -- I especially remember the black and gold set, but there were many.  She would dump the contents onto her bed and I was allowed to finger through the treasures.  There were always butterscotch and peppermint hard candies and packages of juicyfruit gum, a little notepad, pencils and pens, her change purse and checkbook, a tube of Blistex or a little pot of Carmex, and some kind of Avon hand cream or another.  Sometimes there would be a toothpick in the mix -- mom rarely used dental floss that I remember, but often asked for a toothpick after a meal at home, and she sometimes carried one in her purse.  She would probably be embarrassed that I just shared that, and I'm tempted to erase the words but won't, because that's how I remember her, and the scent of that handbag has me remembering her hard right now.

Mom didn't carry makeup in her purse, just a lipstick or two.  I was always amazed that she knew exactly which tube had just the color she wanted to wear - "Hand me the blue lipstick tube," she would say while she was driving, or "the gold tube," or "the silver tube," and when I did, it was always the right color; pinkish or reddish or just a little orangey.  She would use the rear-view mirror to check while she drew carefully over her lips, then she would press them firmly together and check to make sure there were no smudges.  Kleenex.  She always had a package of Kleenex in her purse, and she would press her lips, just once, over a clean Kleenex to remove any excess lipstick.  There were usually one or two spent, lipsticked Kleenexes on the bedspread on purse-cleaning-day.

There would be a little pill case . . . sometimes it was a plastic one, and sometimes she carried fancy ones that she bought when she and dad traveled -- San Francisco, or Miami, or Chicago, or Holland or Germany or Italy or China or India . . . She collected soaps everywhere she traveled, too.  I had forgotten that.  It would have been frivolous to buy a souvenir spoon or thimble or other trinket, although after all seven children left home, she and dad did buy some souvenirs that she used to decorate her home.  Mostly she called these things "just one more thing to clean," but she loved the memories of their trips.  I imagine that she started saving the bars of soap in the days before there was money for "pretty things."  In a shoebox on her top closet shelf there were dozens and dozens of tiny soaps in their printed paper wrappers.  I should have looked at every one of those bars of soap, and written stories about all the places that she and dad traveled - for his work, for family vacations, for church service.  I never wrote those stories, but they were there, in that shoebox of memories that didn't cost my frugal mother a penny.

And in the purse, there would have been a handkerchief, too.  Even though she carried Kleenex, she always had a handkerchief.  It was my job to iron them.  Mom's were small and white with scalloped edges and embroidered flowers in one corner.  Dad carried handkerchiefs, too.  His were large and square with plain geometric patterns woven into the white fabric.  I would press them with the steamy iron on the old wooden ironing board under which we always spread newspaper so that the spray starch wouldn't make the cement floor in the basement sticky and slick.  Then I would neatly fold the handkerchiefs and stack them one on top of another and she would put the little stacks into the drawer in the simple dresser in the small bedroom with the red carpet and the gold bedspread. 

I had never noticed that my purse smells like my mother's purse before.  I never carry gum.  My Bath and Bodyworks hand cream is Japanese Cherry Blossom.  I rarely change my purse -- black in the winter, white in the summer.  I carry a big purse until I get tired of its bulk and then I carry a small one until I get frustrated that I can't take everything I need with me.  Sometimes my purse matches my shoes, but that's happenstance, not fashion.  I'm not as tidy as my mom, and in the bottom of my purse are bound to be crumpled receipts, crumbs from snacks grabbed as I'm running out the door late as usual, and loose change that I just can't be bothered to put into my coin purse.  My reading glasses are essential, but I really only wear them when I walk out of the house without my bifocals, which is often.  I can drive just fine, but can't see a label or a note of music without those readers.

Our purses are as different and as much the same as our lives . . . connected forever and permanently in our hearts and our dreams, but carried out in our own ways, with our own details.  Yesterday, I sensed the closeness of our paths in the scent of a big, black leather purse.  It made me feel a little more official as a grandmother, although I have to say that when it comes to being a grandma, she left a pretty big bag to fill.