Wrangler Dani

I still have the the black bottle of conditioner and the white bottle of shampoo that I took to Florida last year, when Isaiah was born. I use it sparingly, and even so it’s almost gone. I wanted to use the last of it on Isaiah’s first birthday, and even as the bottle sputtered I couldn’t find the heart to throw it away; the scent is too visceral.

Through that smell, I remember the light slanting in the old windows of our beach-town bungalow, the way Addy woke up in the mornings and climbed up the creaking wooden stairs to our attic bedroom, where Isaiah snoozed in a well-fortified windowsill. I remember marveling over his tiny hands and feet, all five pounds of him, so eager to be in the world yet so dwarfed by it. I smell the briny Atlantic air, the cheesy grits at the neighborhood breakfast joint, the fresh pineapple, the sandy beach towels and toys which our AirBnB hosts so graciously left us. I hear the kindness of strangers who oooohed and aaahed over our miniscule bundle of baby and precocious toddler, the warm Southern accents welcoming us into sunshine and slowed pace, even though we were nervous and tired. Our world had cracked open and was slowly finding its way back together again, in a month of small-town strolls and late-night feedings and forgetting that we had another life a country away from these palm trees and spanish moss, open-air markets and “bless yer heart, darlin'”.

I smell the hope of redemption. I remember how the plastic box of formula balanced on the nightstand, how Isaiah’s cries woke me for the first time, how I wondered if he knew how loved he was, that we weren’t going to leave, not ever. I remember holding Adelay tight, telling her this was her story too, that we would always fly across the country for family, that she’d also been scooped up and loved from the very beginning, that this was a good story. I remember a laughter-soaked evening at a bay-side restaurant with Adam’s dad, feeling, with his presence and support, like maybe we could do this; like this undertaking was too big for us, sure, but not impossible. I remember meeting someone at the visitor’s center who remembered us from before, when just Adam and I had traveled across the country three months earlier to show love to a scared expectant mom, when we were full of hope and fear and love and heartache, now realized with joy and wonder in the snoozing little boy on my chest.

Those black and white bottles might stay in my shower forever, like my grandma’s never-quite-finished bars of handsoap that seemed fossilized on the side of the laundry room sink. Isaiah is one year old, a toddler, grinning and cooing and grabbing his sister’s hair and taking unreasonable risks with his bodily safety at every possible opportunity. But though much has changed, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the grace of a tiny infant in a plastic crib, not mine yet, just a cherished hope that, grace upon grace, for the second time I would get to be a mom. That’s what I smell; what I remember.