The Smell of Love

*December 2005

This morning I was walking down my soi, on my way to work, when the woman who owns a restaurant on the corner stopped me, yelling ‘sawat dee ka, sawat dee ka’(hello, hello). I always say good morning to her, her husband and their in-laws when I walk past but the way she kept yelling it at me was different. Finally I realized she wanted me to come towards her.
She handed me a bag. I opened it and found a pale green Thai silk scarf. It’s wide and has little threaded danglies at the end and iridescent horizontal lines every three inches. It’s almost two feet long. It feels so soft it could slip right through my fingers and dissolve.

I managed to understand her sister saying they brought it back from Chang Mai, the northern city they’re from.

I looked up at her, water filling around the corners of my eyes.

“Korp kun ka. Korp kun ka”. Thank you, Thank you. I stretched the words and made them soft the way we would in English to mean ‘so, so much’, but I don’t know if that came across.

Her and her sister smiled at me and handed me the bag to put it back in. I said good-bye, turning on my heels away from the smoking fish, and walked down the rest of the soi on the verge of letting the water in my eyes fall down my face.
It was a moment when you can feel someone’s spirit flow from their hearts to yours, when you know God is in our hands, when people are truly beautiful.

I hate that I can’t tell her how thoughtful that was of her, how breath-taking the scarf is, how I’d be touched beyond words even if I had them. But somehow, I hope she saw it in my eyes.
She doesn’t know my name. I’ve never eaten at her restaurant. And she thought of me.
Now that I’m home, the scarf is hanging over my chair. It’s covered in a strong, wonderful scent like a grandmother’s perfume. It smells like love and it’s filling my room.

I’m looking at it and taking in deep breaths of it, knowing I’ll have it for the rest of my life. I can hear some little girl saying, “Mommy, where did you get that?” And I’m elated that she asked because I can tell her about the time I was living in Thailand and the most wonderful family owned a restaurant that sold smoked fish and spicy chicken next door. The woman and I said hello every day and though we both always wanted to say more, we couldn’t. One day she handed me a bag and inside was this beautiful scarf. “Smell it,” I’ll tell her. So she does. “I can’t smell anything,” she will say, scrunching her freckled nose. Ten years later, the scent is still there. Maybe to my little girl it’s not, but I’ll always remember the smell of love.