***
She didn’t want to smell like a Christmas tree, she said.
“Like a what?” I asked, thinking I didn’t hear her correctly.
“Like a Christmas tree,” she said as if it was the most normal thing to say.
“How can you smell like a Christmas tree?” I asked slightly confused.
I don’t remember her exact answer (this was almost 20 years ago), but I do remember it was about her only using bland smelling soaps and under arm roll on deodorant and nothing else. She went on to explain that too many body products can clash and that her aunt said it made her smell like a Christmas tree with too many decorations on. People would think she was easy.
My friend was raised by her aunt after her mom and dad died. We were respectively 18 and 20 at the time. It was a hot summer January day in South Africa. It was also her birthday. We were walking back from the beach, she to her aunt’s house and me to my grandparents’ apartment were my mom would pick me up later because we lived in another town. I wanted to go test some perfumes at the Department store on our way. I didn’t really want to do it, because I felt hot and sticky and thirsty, but she was going back to college the next week and I was going back to school and I knew I wouldn’t see her for a while. It was hard to let go of the person whom I shared a room with for two years, a person who knew me better than my own family did.
What I didn’t know was that that would be the last time I ever saw her. To this day I still wonder sometimes what happened to her…If she ever had a little girl of her own and if she taught her too that it wasn’t good to smell like a Christmas tree...and if the girl would laugh because it was funny and she felt loved, or if it hurt her like it hurt my friend…or maybe she just didn’t know any different.
But at that moment I thought it was cruel and that it was a little sad that her aunt wouldn’t take a little time and a little love to explore the possibilities with my friend…or at least buy her some products that didn’t clash for goodness sake. How hard could that be?
Does it make you a kind person, to care for an orphan? Obviously not. Yes, it was good of her to take in my friend when she had nowhere else to go, but why did she have to make her feel guilty and stupid and unloved all the time?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I remember her saying this funny, sad thing and I remember how it made me feel…But then, my mother never told me about tampons.
Maybe my friend thought that was cruel.
thank you sO much.
Loved the material traces in those memories, smilegrl!! gracias!! 
