Permanent

I saw a post asking what smell do you miss most. One smell that I recollect vividly was from my wife Cindy Morrison Beck. It was a smell I detested at the time, but it is one that reminds me of her. Cindy had straight, baby-fine hair. It was dark brown, almost black, but in the sunlight it had an auburn glint. One of her desires since childhood was to have curly or wavy hair.

As a child her mom, Retha Johnson Morrison would cut her hair in a short pixie style. It was almost the same style that she wore as an adult, sometimes a bit longer, but she never got rid of her craving for wavy hair. She envied our children when they had the wavy hair that she wanted.

Cindy wanted longer curly hair even as a child. She would save the empty red mesh onion bags and put them on her head to imitate a ponytail. After she shared this secret with me, I would save other mesh bags from oranges and tangerines and give them to her. She was an adult and needed a larger bag. She would laugh and throw them away, but occasionally she would don the bag for a few seconds.

About every other year, her desire to have curls or waves would overwhelm her common sense and she would go to the beauty parlor for a permanent. The harsh hair condiment would make her hair wavy for two days at the most before her baby-fine hair would lose the curl and the straight hair would sag and droop.

The strong chemical smell far outlasted the curl. For two weeks the powerful smell filled our bedroom. I would roll over away from her and at least the aroma wasn’t right under my nose. The smell was so strong, it almost made my eyes water. I had to turn my back to her in bed so I could breathe. It was the only way to avoid the noxious fumes. I won’t say that I hated the smell, but it was very near the bottom of the list of my favorite smells.

As a nurse, I’ve been exposed to odors that would turn most people’s stomachs. I won’t describe them, but suffice it to say in nearly 45 years as a corpsman in the US Navy, 4 years to earn my BSN, and hospital work; I’ve had a wide variety of olfactory assaults.

Now I return to answer to the question, what is the smell I miss, it’s permanent.