Life's Tapestry with Selene Jones

The earliest memory I have of my mother comes back to me in the uncapping of a jar of Vicks Vapor Rub.  Opening the jar and releasing that strong mentholated greasy aroma into the room and offering it up to my olfactory senses is for me like letting a ‘genie out of a bottle’ with its strong magical healing presence.  My husband is a wholehearted believer in its powers too; we were both raised on its promises, so in the thirty some years we have been married it has become a staple in our home, as important as bread and milk.  Unlike bread and milk, one small midnight-blue jar lasts so long I am convinced it will be one of the last belongings our son will pull from our bathroom cabinet after our deaths.  I can see him standing there holding it considering whether to keep it or toss it, wondering if it is still effective in its ability to ease his breathing and allow him to get a good nights rest.  If he decides to keep it, it should last him a lifetime as well, my husband and I both inherited the partial jars our mothers left in their bathroom cabinets, easily a lifetime supply for several generations.

But it’s my first memory that is awakened the moment its aroma and its magical healing power escape from the small midnight-blue jar.  My dad had been sent overseas for a year when I was two years old and sometime during that year I became sick with Red Measles.  There weren’t vaccines for measles when I was a child, so my mother was well prepared to manage this common childhood illness.   She had been through it many times with my older siblings.  But as was my mother’s luck during the long periods of my father’s absence, the measles weren’t running their course and instead of getting better I was getting worse.  I had developed one of the serious complications of measles; I had come down with pneumonia too.  I remember the doctor coming out to our house to see me and standing there telling my mother how to make me more comfortable as my fever and my coughing had both become incessant.  While he was there my mother went about filling the stainless steel humidifier with water and taking a spoonful of Vicks Vapor Rub as he directed and dropping it into some little container on the top of it.  Very soon the room was spewing that glorious warm vapor now saturated with the strong aroma of that magical mentholated rub.  My incessant coughing began subsiding and finally I could rest.  And just as important, Mama could rest now too.  I could feel her worry and anxiety becoming lighter as she carried me to Daddy’s recliner.

We had this old overstuffed rocker recliner, I remember the joy of being in it while older siblings whose feet could touch the floor would rock it back and forth, back and forth, and then spin it until my eyes would roll and my head would become wobbly.  It was my favorite inside activity, it was huge and two or three of us could sit in it at a time while the others spun it in circles on its metal underpinning.  Our giggles and squeals of sheer delight would often drown out the sound of the giant RCA black and white TV that sat in the corner of the room on its four legs vying for our attention.  But we were the kind of kids that preferred the interactive energy of the chair to the passive energy the TV emitted.  The TV was still a fairly new arrival in our world and hadn’t yet found the power to quietly sit us down or keep us inside on a pretty day.  Its day would come but it had not come yet to our house full of growing children.   The chair was definitely ‘dibs’ material when Daddy wasn’t home and was seldom free of our bouncing little bottoms.  Mama got to sit in it whenever she wanted when Daddy was away and although she may have held me and rocked me in its overstuffed frame since birth, it is this memory of being held by my mother on the throne in our kingdom that has stayed with me.

I remember feeling so bad and so weak and so cold when Mama lowered us onto its soft well-worn upholstery. I was sitting facing her, my legs wrapped around her waist and my feet neatly tucked between the seat cushion and the back of the chair.  I remember how warm my feet became tucked into this small space behind the small of my mother’s back.  My arms hanging motionless exhausted at my sides, and my hair being sticky and plastered to the side of my face from fever, I could feel the little ringlets tickling me as they were drying and springing from my cheeks.  But mostly, I remember my mother’s voice, soothing me, as I drifted somewhere in between my feverish dreams and her lap well worn from already thirteen years of mothering.

And I remember the smell of Vicks Vapor Rub, set free through the bursts of steamy air that filled the space in us and between us, the scent with its strong healing presence permeating the space, the chair, and my exhausted mother holding me, holding us.  The healing power returns as I uncap that small midnight-blue jar and that mentholated aroma embraces me as it did over fifty years ago in the arms of my mother and magically I am feeling better.