Plain Chapstick

When the sky turns grey and looks like snow, it reminds me of winters in the 90's, when I would be home from school. We’d spend the day or two after Christmas in a packing frenzy, unloading the contents of my parents’ closet, which housed all of our ski gear, on to their floor.

We’d pack duffel bags full of wool and polypropylene layers, ski goggles, mittens, and my dad’s old ski boots (no helmets in those days) and head north for a week.

I remember little snippets: I remember the year it was SO cold that our fingers froze inside of our mittens. Ten years later, my index and pinkie on my left hand still get ice cold well before the rest of my digits. I remember the year my dad took my brother and I skiing when my grandfather was sick and my mom stayed home, and somehow my dad and I ended up having to share a full bed while my brother slept alone in a California king in the next room.

But what I remember most vividly is the smell of the ski gear, especially inside the lodge after a fully day of skiing. It’s the smell of sweaty hair mingling with damp wool. The smell of stale bread and warm chili. And most potently, the smell of plain chapstick, which we slathered it on generously on chairlift rides. Somehow, the waxy smell infiltrated every fiber of our clothes, so that the next year we could still smell the remnants of long-forgotten tubes. My dad always wore plain chapstick, and I remember the smell of his beard when he kissed me on the forehead, perspiration mixed with the smell of wool and wax. And, my mom usually carried the neon-red cherry tube, sickly sweet.

Oddly enough, it’s not the sight of the blue and white (or pink and white) tube that makes my nose tingle like there’s wax in the air, but instead its the fall of snowflakes and the drop in temperature that brings that memory back.