I have a bar of soap in my bathroom that was gifted to me by almost a total stranger. It smells like my grandmother. I can’t recall what it was supposed to smell like -- some serenity white tea nonsense or the other -- but every time I walk into my bathroom, I smell my grandmother when she lived in Hawaii.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I know it. The way I know the smell of the downstairs closet where Grandpops kept the boogie boards and snorkels (saltwater and rubber and flippers that were always a little too big for my feet). It’s the way that the feel of certain things will remind me of the rustling paper sound of the bamboo ring curtains in the spare bedroom, with gray raindrops on the other side of the glass. It’s the biting of pumiced lava rock under my bare feet and the way that I’ll always expect to hear my Auntie Marge laughing when I take a bite of potato salad or how a tuna salad sandwich is supposed to have little grains of sand in it from picnics at the beach. It’s the weight of the air when you step off the plane and the sound of the ocean in a sea shell. It’s the ribbon of watercolor that snakes off a paint brush resting in a glass of water. The smooth coolness of my grandmother’s hands as she tucks a flower behind my ear. A plumeria flower. A white one.
That’s it. I remember, I’m ten years old and I’m wearing a sweatshirt with a rhinoceros on it and Grandma puts a sweet plumeria flower behind my ear -- my right ear because I’m not married yet, She smiles. That’s the smell. That moment. That’s as close as I can get to it.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it, that all that is sitting in a ceramic dish in my bathroom, in one little bar of soap?