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I salvaged most of these from the laundry cupboard, the bathroom sinks and tub, the shelf in the shower, and the kitchen drainboard when I emptied my parents’ house in Grants Pass in 2007 after my mother died; I retrieved the rest from my father’s apartment after he died here in Portland in 2009. That collection has been sitting on a ledge by the laundry sink for all these years, rarely used. Some are stacked in a bright yellow plastic child’s McDonald’s cup; others reside in a lidless old freezer container. A piece might be picked up once in a while to wash hands after painting or gardening. Mostly they’ve been archaeological specimens, kept because I invest too much meaning in everything and because I am not a model of efficiency.

I have entertained various ideas lately as to how to manage these remnants. Until last Thursday, it never occurred to me to dump them into the garbage. Nor did it occur to me to just put them in the soap dish in the bathroom or the kitchen and use them, perhaps because they seemed to speak in a little voice that said “Don’t. Do you want to be sad every single time you wash your hands?” In an era when frequent hand-washing became a matter of life and death, that little voice spoke often and confusingly in my tired mind.

One idea was to melt all that soap down and make liquid hand soap. I spent perhaps hours cruising online, goggling at all the women who do things like this, boil things down, make their own oat milk, sew their own underwear, whatever.

I even tentatively launched into a little hand-soap craft project, having studied many variations on the instructions, all of which called for first grating the soap. With a grater. That seemed laborious and perhaps bloody. So, instead, I first threw a couple of large handfuls of chips and shards into the Cuisinart, reasoning that, even if they smelled of both soap and perfume and would somehow get into the works of the processor, I could most certainly wash it all out afterwards because after all it was soap, right? So I pushed pulverize and immediately regretted it, as soap dust rose into the air, went straight into my sinuses, and continued into my brain. That was the end of that experiment.

Another thought via the Internet: I was going to mix them up in water and dissolve them somehow (boil them? stir them furiously?), creating, with the addition of borax and soda, a concoction approximating liquid laundry detergent. I bought borax and even got a bucket with measurements on it for this purpose, after browsing the large and beautiful bucket selection at Fred Meyer for at least twenty minutes. I had no idea how my front-loading washer would like this soup in its handy dispenser, but how could it be dangerous, because it is just soap, except that maybe it is dangerous, what with all that soda and everything.  Isn’t that how elementary teachers make volcanoes in the classroom?

I even considered offering them to my husband with a brush and a handsome shaving mug. My father used a shaving brush long past the spray can era, but does anyone at all do this anymore? I think not.

I continued to stall. Every time I used the laundry sink to wash wool socks and scrub out a paint bucket, I eyed them and sorted through the bars and chips of soaps in my mind. For some reason, the one that tugged the hardest was the Fels Naptha. It was a little brown block, chopped long ago from a long heavy bar of the stuff, and it had, in my memory, one use: to scrub away the oil of poison oak.

My Rogue Valley childhood was full of tramping around in the woods, floating down the Rogue River in the drift boat we shared with friends, going on picnic after picnic. We were stung by yellowjackets, poked with blackberry thorns, and sunburnt, and even saw the occasional rattlesnake. But poison oak was the worst. My brothers got it occasionally, but I was afflicted most often. One Easter I begged not to go to Mass because I looked like a late-season pumpkin, made far worse by the lovely straw hat with the ribbon down the back perched on my swollen head.

About halfway through my childhood, the local lore was passed down to my mother: to avoid the worst of poison oak, you should scrub down with Fels Naptha after a sojourn in the wild. Henceforth, we slid into the bathtub after swimming at Jumpoff Joe or drifting the Rogue or picnicking at Snailback Creek on the Illinois, and scrubbed ourselves pink with Fels Naptha, which smelled pleasantly of kerosene. And so the old bar landed in my house in Portland, ready to be of service decades after the last time I had poison oak.

The lineup of soaps also included: Dove, gentle for my mother’s dry hands; little shards of Yardley and Bronnley Lemon Soap (the ones shaped like lemons); and the plain and humble rectangle of Ivory, that quintessential soap that smells only of soap, nothing else, nothing fancy, nothing pretentious.

But after too many years, I have begun to think about how to clear out this house as I age, oppressed by the piles and stacks of this and that, things that will never be used up. I clearly need a ritual for throwing things away, because I cannot hold on to everything that my mother’s hands once held or my father gave to me. I have had some practice, and once or twice succeeded at cutting my ties to beloved possessions. Once, for example, at the rainy summer farm wedding of my daughter’s best friend, my own wedding shoes that is, the shoes that I wore at my own wedding and to hers completely disintegrated, like sugar in water, as I sank into the wet grass. I wore a borrowed pair of brown Birkenstocks with my lovely summer frock for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

But I could not bring myself to throw out the ruined shoes unceremoniously. So I wrapped them in a threadbare pink pillowcase of my grandmother’s, carefully and neatly, and kissed them goodbye before I set them gently in the garbage can.

That pink pillowcase came out of the stacks of linens that were my grandmother’s. I once wrapped our old cat Cece in another pink pillowcase after the kind vet helped her off into oblivion, before burying her behind the hydrangea in the garden. These old linens bring some decorum to the necessary disposition of the beloved.

You may ask, what’s the difference? You still threw the shoes into the garbage. But I bade the shoes goodbye first. I thought about them. I honored them, because I had walked across the grass in those shoes on an August afternoon years earlier with my hand in Isaac’s, and therefore they were somehow sanctified.   

I grew up around devout people who leaned on objects to cast a quotidian holiness on our lives: the Virgin Mary holding a loaf of bread in her arms on the kitchen windowsill, the Botticelli angels on my grandmother’s wall, my grandfather’s rosary beside the bed. My forebears were not pious or ostentatious about this: no extra signs of the cross or lugubrious mantillas at Mass. But these objects seemed to carry them along. When my mother was beset with three very young children close in age, I think that Mary on the windowsill with the Christ Child pawing at her knee meant solace, perhaps sisterhood, to her.

So perhaps I learned to cling to what could carry me, what might keep my parents with me in a very small way, long after they died. My mother’s thin fingers held this little bit of soap as she washed her hands with hot water to take away the pain of arthritis, then dried them carefully, her rings so loose. The green bar from my father’s apartment reminded me of his hands, short fingers strong, fast, and loose as they curved over the piano keys, pounding away.

My people were thrifty. Waste not, want not. Eat the skin, it’s good for you. The meat of the chicken neck is the best part. Grind up the heel of a loaf for bread crumbs. Wash your hands until the sliver evaporates.

I held on to the soap for years. But I yearned for that sense that I have always loved, when you climb clumsily over the piles of driftwood onto the loose sand, slipping along, and take off your sandals, set them next to an odd-looking log that you will remember when you look for them on your way back, and maybe even leave your jacket, too, then walk barefoot towards the surf, finding your line along the water, leaving all of it behind, washing your mind clean.

For fourteen years I was not ready, so I left the soaps there beside the sink. But last Thursday, a week before my seventieth birthday, I tumbled all of the slivers and cakes into a pretty bag from the duty-free shops in Athens brought back by my parents decades earlier, kissed the bag goodbye, and yes, tossed it in the kitchen garbage.

 

Fly, My Darling: a love story

By Lisa K. Richter

  A soulful memoir of desire and a woman’s midlife quest to let go—in jazz and in life   Lisa—a classically trained pianist, wife, and mother—yearns for something she can’t define. After she begins a study of jazz improv with an outspoken, trailblazing musician from the ’70s girl band era, a woman who encourages Lisa to let go musically and emotionally, life takes an unexpected, irrevocable turn. When they become lovers, what began as a desire to learn jazz becomes a lesson in letting go: with music, with an old way of living, and finally with life itself.


With rhythmic, imaginative prose, Fly, My Darling explores the resilience of love, the weight of loss, the undeniable pull toward freedom, and the transformation that occurs when a woman finally asks, What do I really want? Based on the author’s years together with musician and visionary composer Lynda Roth, past and present weave together in this intimate journey of awakened eroticism and music.

“A graceful and spare memoir of personal transformation and loss.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Available at Bookshop, Simon & Schuster, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local independent bookstore.

More at LisaKRichter.com

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