My grandmother smelled clean.
Remembering with five senses.
My grandmother smelled clean. Not like that perfumed soap or that cologne that clogs all your pores. Clean, that's all. You could hide your face in her arm, in that hollow between the elbow and the chest that forms when falling asleep on the sofa with the arms crossed, and there you could lose yourself among white linens and cotton T-shirts hanging in the sun to dry.
She always combed her hair with one of those shoulder dresses that ladies from yesteryear used so as not to get hair all over their clothes. She sewed them with batiste fabric, soft and smooth, and added some lace or crochet trimming because pretty is always pretty, even if you use it only in the privacy of your bathroom. And her hair was always perfect, half-crisped by hairspray to form the curls she had never had.
She had flabby arms, without being fat, because that's what happens when you work all your life and then get old, your muscles loosen so that your grandchildren can sit next to you and massage them, because "abuelita, you're so soft".
Once, when I was working abroad, I called her out of the blue, and in her surprise she was so happy that I could feel her love speeding across the Atlantic to make her words echo in my eardrums. I thought- “How nice to feel loved without asking for it”.
Once I told her- "I love you grandma", and she replied- "don't talk nonsense". My grandmother didn't talk about love. When you're made of love, there's no need for words.
The last time I kissed her goodbye I was pregnant with my first child. And I was so full of life, I didn't notice that hers was ending. "See you in the summer," I said. “Grandma doesn't think she'll make it to summer," she replied.
And she didn't.
There are a lot of other things I'd like to remember, like the taste of her bunyuelos, the texture of the chocolate she bought to eat with doughnuts, and the touch of her skin when I stretched her wrinkles to measure their depth.
And I, who as a child thought that my wavy hair was the result of being her granddaughter until I realised that my grandmother's curls were the result of her stubbornness, now go around doing genetic tests on me and my mother to see how much of mine was hers. Because memories are not enough for me, I want something tangible from her, even if it’s just a handful of DNA.
Memory is cruel, letting you remember without leaving any physical trace. Maybe that's why I hug my children until they say half-stifled - "Mum, OK, you love me, I get it". Just to try to embed a bit of them in my body or for their skin to feel me when I'm gone. To change the sad end of memories, relegated to abstract entities in some lost groove of the brain.
This is so beautifully written, you can smell and feel every tactile aspect as you read! Caused a poke to the heart for me and made me remember my own grandma, my favorite relative and best childhood memory.
So much longing and regret that I didn’t get to share so many things in my life with her, to this day, I just wish she could have been here and been part of the happiness and all the good things and people that have happened, including her grandchild.
Your grandma must have been a wonderful person to have been so loved and to live on in memory.
“My grandmother didn't talk about love. When you're made of love, there's no need for words.”
So much truth in that statement.Thank you for taking me down a path in my heart that leads to memories of my gramma. How you gently touch her face with an opened hand, is how I greeted my own gramma. Time has taken the visual memories, leaving pictures blurred behind rain soaked glass. Close my eyes , and like you, I smell her ‘clean’ scent. I can still feel how her smile made me melt. And I can hear her soft melodic voice telling bedtime fables that ended with a moral to them, as she sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. You have reminded me where I can always find my gramma. And in return, now you know your children will always find you, if they just close their eyes.