Sitting On My Mother

By Vincent Mowrey • October 2020

The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time.

— Walt Whitman

June 2016

My high-school sweetheart and her roommate are expecting me in Room 139 of the hotel where we are staying for our class reunion. The door is ajar. I tap twice, walk in, and say, “Wait a minute. What’s that smell? I know that smell!”

Forty years later I still remember the name of her perfume: White Shoulders.

These days, at gatherings of my peers, the atmosphere no longer crackles with the static of youthful libidos. We strive to project a facade of dignity, the only edge we have over younger generations. But my first true love wearing White Shoulders — that is totally unfair. You know that growl Roy Orbison makes in “Oh, Pretty Woman”? Rrrrraaoooow. That’s appropriate here. Mercy.

Vincent Mowrey

Correspondence

The scent of White Shoulders was right there with me as I read “Sitting on My Mother” [October 2020]. Like Vincent Mowrey’s former sweetheart, I wore this perfume as a teenager — and later at my wedding.

I identified with many of the details in his essay, from high-school reunions to graveyard visits. My mother died when I was six, so it was her grave that my family visited every Sunday after services at the Methodist church. I didn’t sit on her, but I scuffed my shoes around in the dirt and still remember the smell of hyacinths in the summer.

I felt like I was reading about myself — about the circles we draw around death, and the songs of the living.

Marsha Owens Richmond, Virginia

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