June Things

The one about summertime, sunshine and...soap.

Jun 03, 2023

In the bathroom here, there’s a bar of Irish Spring soap. This morning, I took a shower, and the scent instantly pulled me back to another time. Transported me to a very specific period of my life, as a carefree grad student at NYU, visiting my dad in Brooklyn on the weekends. By that point, my parents and I no longer lived in New York City, having moved to the west coast about a decade prior. My dad still had a place in my hometown, though, where he’d stay whenever he traveled to New York for work, and on extended trips to hang out with me after I’d started at NYU.

Without my mom around (she was normally back at our house on the west coast), there were a few things I could always count on at my dad’s pretend bachelor pad. Frozen Steak-Um in the freezer (😝), thin, blue airline blankets that seemed to be hiding in every corner, cans of crushed tomatoes in the kitchen for pasta sauce, and, of course, Irish Spring soap in the bathroom. Back home, with my mom, we used Dove soap exclusively, a preference I still subscribe to as an adult with my own home. But this green bar, it always distinctly reminded me I was hanging out with my dad, and I secretly loved the way it flooded the bathroom with the bright smell of… well, I’m not sure honestly. A fake meadow? Cheap cologne? On days when I was overwhelmed, or after I’d been in a pretty serious accident during grad school, the scent was comforting and familiar and reminded me my dad was around. That stability and love and home were riiiight there, even if it wasn’t technically a place I considered home, and even without my mom there.

Right now, I’m at my parents’ house in Las Vegas. Another house I never lived in, as my parents moved here after I was already an adult and out on my own. It’s a place that, for the last almost 3 years, reverberates with my mom’s absence now, and is colored with the small cracks that begin to appear when your parents start to age, slowly at first and then seemingly all at once — when they start to seem different but familiar in ways that are hard to put your finger on. A way that feels like time is slipping away while it’s still there, right in front of you. Lately, it’s been hard to be here, at least for me.

But this time, after we arrived on Thursday evening — the first day of June, and the day after my dad’s 85th birthday — my dad shuffled to his bedroom and came back with a bar of Irish Spring soap. For showers, he explained. Something about that gesture, the memory… somehow I felt — I feel — like things will be okay. Summer will come around once again, and we’ll all breathe out a sense of relief at the sunshine and the freedom, stand in the sunlight and push our never-ending worry list to the side, if, at least, temporarily. My dad’s birthday has always marked the start of summer, and, coincidentally, mine bookmarks its end. The in-between was always a time of so much joy and eating figs right off the trees in our backyard and toes in the pool while eating subs from the corner store. For the last few years, though, that lightness was gone, summer was thick and difficult, like treading water, now punctuated my the loss of my mom right in the middle. I wonder now, though, if it can be both. If we can soar above the pain, come back to the joy and the familiarity and the comfort — even in the missing.

So Many Somethings

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