It is May 6th today which means it has been five days since people officially took off their heavy garments and travelled much lighter in the streets and in beds.
But that’s of course all in the head of someone used to having a household rule not to ease the burden before May 1st. It is this date that as children we anticipated so eagerly, we waited impatiently for the day when mother would let us wear only one layer of clothing instead of three or four.
She would never allow it that we break this rule but some times some of us children would violate this sacred code and would dare to wear a T-shirt before May 1st. Amusingly enough, this child would always get sick shortly afterwards and mother would win, but she would not be happy about her triumph.
We have a small storage room in the house, and it has several large shelves installed in the wall for storing things. That’s where all out travel bags are, and the fat vaccum cleaner, and collections upon collections of old, deformed textiles and plastic bags. This room is special; it is never tidy and it is never well-lit- which gives it an air of mystery.
We call it, minimally, the small room. We use a ladder to climb up to the top shelves and to get the heavy travel bags down, and it is very very difficult to squeeze a ladder and a person and a chubby bag going downwards in the small room.
This difficulty made it a tough task to retrieve our summer clothes, and although we all yearn for the nice feeling of air against our skins, we put this off and mother eventually does it on her own.
The bags are always full of things we had long forgotten, things that seem so new. One bag is baby blue with a white round sticker on it, another is large and made of brown leather but someone wrote our family name on it in big red letters, and there is a set of three black plain bags in three degrees of size that I like so much. Each bag has a character of its own and each reveals a different treasure.
When we were children, mother would open one bag a day to keep the house in order. That did not help much, our rooms would swim in clothes that need ironing and looking into, and the garage would resemble a shop with lots and lots of tailored fabrics hanging in the sun. There would be also fresh bars of soap out on the floors, pecans, and little white bags that smelled funny and had tiny cehmical pearls inside.
Mother had a magical way of preserving items that belong to the 70’s and 80’s. We had a large original Mexican hat and a poncho in the big brown leather bag, and several thick medals in the blue bag. There were also slippers, charleston pants, dresses at least twenty five years old in the bags.
So when the sun climbs higher, lighting the hall leading to the small room and the calendar reads May 1st, we know it is time to discover the secrets of last summer- it’s our ritual that smells like pecans and soap and feels like leather.
