Whether good or bad, our noses don’t lie: smells bring back memories.

Earlier this week, I set out to do something that I hadn’t done in a long time. It was an overdue something that I let build up over the past six years that my husband and I have lived in this house. Oh, it started out innocently enough: a hair clip here, a bottle of perfume there – shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste, makeup, allergy medicine, cotton balls – the list is long and decidedly bathroomesque.

My bathroom vanity was a veritable wasteland of half-used bottles, sticky substances, hair paraphernalia – the works. I have no one to blame but myself. It took six years for me to totally muck up four drawers and an under-sink cabinet. The time had come for me to clean that shit up.

I placed a cardboard box next to me as I slowly made my way through the drawers. I’ll keep this, toss that, and give this away. By the end of the day (well, actually it took me two days to cull through everything…), I’d made a respectable improvement, ditching nearly half of the contents and filling the box with natural hair care products to take to my sister, Wanda, who had recently cut nearly all her hair off.

In the midst of my purging mission, in the middle drawer of the cabinets on the left, I came across something that brought my flurry of activity to a halt. Sitting in the back of the drawer, tucked away under an unused purple shower scrunchie, a pair of false eyelashes (what the hell was I thinking), and a tube of Gold Bond Foot Cream was a familiar but forgotten sight.

It was a burgundy and gold bottle of Imari scented body lotion.

The bottle, mostly unused, belonged to my mother. I took it from her dresser after she passed away unexpectedly in 2007. Imari was her favorite scent.

It’s funny how our olfactory senses are tied to our memories. Some smells bring back memories of childhood, our first love, or a happy time in our lives. The slightest whiff of a familiar scent can send us hurtling back in time – one year, five years, ten years, decades. We close our eyes and we are there, wherever ‘there’ is for each of us, and time has no meaning, the future is too far off to imagine, and we’re reliving a moment that we thought had gone.

Sometimes the smells bring about heartache, pain, and memories we want to erase from our being. Other times, they make us smile, hum to ourselves, and swear to ourselves that we’re never leaving this place – that there where we’ve found ourselves transported.

I brought the bottle up to my nose and sniffed through the thick plastic cap. It smelled the same as it did when I last smelled it on my Mom. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply of her scent. I could see her, standing in front of me, her body turned slightly to the side, and she smiled a smile as only she could. The quickly fading sun shining through the skylight cast just enough light to cause her earrings to sparkle like the finest diamond.

I wanted to stay there, in my bathroom, in front of the regurgitated contents of junk drawers, breathing in her scent, filling my nostrils with her memory. When I opened my eyes, she was gone. But her scent remained.

Quietly, I closed the bathroom door, sat down on my tiny vanity stool, and cried.

I miss my Mom so much. I miss her warm touch, her earthly voice, her decadent cooking, her soft hair, her long and lovely fingernails, her big, beautiful eyes. I can still hear the sound of her voice on my telephone answering machine saying, “Val-re, it’s your mother…” in her distinctive drawl. Yeah, she called me Val-re just like my Dad, but no one else does . . . or can.

I miss not having a mother around.

As we approach Mother’s Day, I’ll likely want to do the same thing that I silently vow I’ll do every year at this time: stay in bed all day, curled up under the covers, hugging myself and crying. But I don’t. Mom wouldn’t want me to do that.

Instead, I honor my mother through the wonderful memories we’ve shared, the good times that cling to me like a comfortable pair of jeans, and the not so good times that – along with her wisdom – taught me life lessons that will stay with me forever.

My mom is not here. She’s never lived in my home. She never had a chance to meet my husband. She knows nothing about our dog, Chaka. But . . . Mom is here. She’s in every corner, every crevice, every thin line, every space because her essence lives on in me.

On this upcoming Mother’s Day, if you’re fortunate enough and blessed to still have your mom with you, love her. Cherish her. Visit her if you can. Set up a video call with her. Pick up the telephone and call her. Let her know how special she is to you. Forget about the strife, the arguments, the cross words, the anger, the grudge, the “we just don’t get along” – forget all of that. The woman who gave birth to you, the woman who raised you, the woman who took you in as her own, the woman who loved you even though she didn’t give birth to you – show her, express to her, tell her you love her before she’s gone.

One day, you may be going through a drawer and uncover a bottle of scented lotion that brings the memories of your mother flooding back to you and you’ll think about all the times you said, “I love you.” No matter how much you’ve said it, when you’re turning that bottle over and over in your hands and breathing in the scent that takes you back, you’ll feel like you never said it enough.