A pungent memory

By CAROLYN ROSS

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

We've been cleaning out closets since our dear friend Pat died.

We began in the spare room, the easiest room, the least personal, and found the rejected gifts Pat hadn't liked but couldn't bear to throw away:

The dachshund painting, an amateur reminder of how Pat loved dogs, that breed in particular. Bags of old pictures. Old vases. Old stuffed animals. Newsweek magazines from years past. The poker chips we'd used when Pat taught us how to play five-card stud. Funny how she never taught us well enough to beat her.

We tackled the bedroom next. Shoes, shoes and more shoes, so many in the same style but different colors. Pat believed in bulk buying. She had more clothes than I'd thought she could remember, but she remembered.

Even at the nursing home, when we knew Pat was never coming home, never leaving her bed, she'd asked for specific clothes from the maze of her closet. Sweat shirts and denim shirts, T-shirts and button-down short-sleeved shirts, pedal pushers and whatever else had tickled her fancy late at night when she watched the Home Shopping channel and ordered because she was bored.

Ancient Merrill Lynch statements littered the floor of Pat's closet, the last stop on a mailbox-to-living-room-to-mail-on-the-bed "filed" trail. None, though, was as yellowed as the canceled checks dated 1964, squirreled in the corner of the closet.

In the mixture of scents that made up Pat's house, it wasn't until we reached the hall closet that we realized, recognized, remembered the odor that defined Pat. There, amid the navy blue warm-up jacket decorated with yacht club gold anchors, the once-pink windbreaker, formal stole, vacuum cleaner and bags of clothes-to-one-day-be-donated, it hit us.

"Mothballs!" my mother and I said.

And we laughed.

"Remember? The soup?"

Growing up, I never enjoyed snacking at Pat's house. Not because she didn't have a generous selection of treats: cookies, cakes, ice cream, caramel squares and Sno Balls from her private stash. Anything I desired materialized from the depths of the pantry.

I snacked out of politeness, pretended the cookies tasted like cookies, cakes like cakes. But all I really tasted was mothballs. I wasn't sure what mothballs were, had never seen them, but I knew what they tasted like. I marveled that I could taste an odor.

The soup incident happened later, when I was older. Mom had decided to make vegetable soup for dinner one night but didn't have enough in the house. She'd mentioned this in passing while we were visiting Pat, and Pat offered the bag of vegetables she had in her freezer. Mom accepted. "After all," she whispered to me after Pat had gone into the kitchen, "surely frozen food won't taste like Pat's house."

Mom prepared the soup, heated the base, then dumped in the vegetables, first making sure they smelled normal. When she announced that dinner was ready, my brothers and I grabbed our bowls and crackers and lined up for ladles full of delicious-smelling soup. Vegetable-smelling soup. We slurped our first spoonful. Looked around the table at one another.

"Do you think. . . . ?"

"Nah, can't be!"

"But they were frozen!"

Everyone tried another spoonful. Then one more to make sure. Resigned, we put down our spoons.

Mom poured the rest of the soup down the drain, and that was the last time we borrowed food from Pat.

We've been cleaning out closets since Pat died, missing Pat, breathing in deeply the smell of her and laughing that Pat's smell tasted strong enough to defy the laws of nature. So invasive. That soup. Those snacks. Mothballs. The flavor of Pat's house.

Carolyn Ross lives, mothball-free, in Dunedin.

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