A smell can break your heart

I breathed in a most evocative scent today. For a moment I didn't know where I was.

I'd been walking back up the mall toward the library at lunchtime when I passed a young woman going the other way. While she was still in view I noticed that her nonchalant air was being undermined by one's sense of its being assumed--I don't think deliberate nonchalance ever works, do you?

But then all that was forgotten as she passed me and I breathed in, in her wake, the exact, long-forgotten scent of the hand soap that was used, in the 1960s, in the ladies' bathrooms at White Cloud State Park. I recognized it immediately, as if forty years were nothing. Oh, it wafted me back to that park and to my childhood, and it made me want to laugh and cry, because I used to own that smell, I used to carry it away with me on freshly washed hands, and it was part of me. It was a nonchalant part of my world, uncherished and almost unnoticed, because we camped there so often, summer after long summer as I grew taller, and how can something that was a part of me be so gone? So gone.

And what was that smell? Is it really gone forever again, so soon after rushing back to me out of nowhere? Should I have run after the girl crying, "Wait, Wait!"?

Comments

[ms. noxy]

[this is good] Aww, poor ruth! You definitely should have stopped the lady! She may have thought you to be insane, but it woulda been worth it. Hehe.

Mayhaps, just mayhaps, the similar scent is now used as in a regular soap/hand soap/dish soap... maybe on a shopping day, you can wander those soap aisles and sniff the various types. Oh how I wish I knew the scent too! I'd wander over to walmart right now and try to help!

[Raymundus]

That's what I like! A woman that's easy to please.

No diamonds or pearls for this one. Just give her a bottle of hand soap from wherever the White Cloud State Park purchased theirs.

I'm on my way to the DNR supply depot, luv.

[Vishy]

[this is good] Beautiful to read about the scent which wafted across time and place :)

[Jen]

[this is good] You definitely should have stopped the lady and asked her what the scent was and where she got it!!