The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: PERFUME

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

For links to the prompts I've written on so far this year, please click on The Butterfly Hours tab above.

This month's prompts are notebook, October, office, pajamas, paper, party, pencil, perfume, phone book, photograph, pictures.

PERFUME

Once when my sister and I were big-enough little girls to take a bath partly unattended, I had the idea of adding perfume to the water to make it smell good. (This was before stores like Bath & Body Works existed.) Ever the big sister, I was the one to lift from the warm water and dash naked and dripping across the bathroom linoleum to the counter where my mom's things were displayed.

We didn't add just one bottle, of course. We added perfume from ALL the bottles! My mom was not too happy when she discovered us! What smelled divine to us didn't rest so well on my mother's olfactory senses... and there was the waste, of course. A drop might have been fine, but we'd used far more than a drop!

What's extra interesting to me is that there were any perfume bottles at all, as my memories/ideas about my mom do not include such frivolities. She's always experienced sinus issues and is particularly sensitive to smells. But apparently, at one point in time, at least, my mother had not just one bottle of perfume, but several.