August 31, 2025

NOTES FROM THE BALCONY, ENTRY #6
Not all memories rot. Some keep their perfume.

Today is the last day of August as I sit and finish this blog post, which I actually started more than six weeks ago. I let this one sit for a while, as some things take longer to develop, and it has gathered a bit of dust. Let’s brush it off and see what’s there.

—

A soft blow, a sweep of the right hand over left palm, open, and we enter Italy through a little pink box.

Catching light, the container is hypnotic. Its blush pearlescent surface leads the eye around the central image of the Madonna, and even now almost twenty years later, it smells exactly like roses when you open it. The scent was so strong the first time it hit me, when I popped her open on the rooftop of the Vatican back in 2009. A group of friends and I had just climbed all 551 steps to the top and, like any great religious-monument-turned-tourist-trap, there was a little stand selling Catholic trinkets and images of the Pope on keychains. Plentiful as the tchotchkes were, I didn't pay attention to much else besides that mesmerizing pink palm-sized treasure chest. Curled inside it was a thin rosary chain. Much like with the first taste of writer Marcel Proust's madeleine cookie, the scent coming from the box combined with my post-stairs breathlessness and its mesmerizing glimmer created a moment of radical temporal instability. I was transported into my Granny's soft arms.

The box was smooth, cold, heavy for its size. It warmed up quickly in my hands as I opened and observed it in the midday sun. I couldn't ignore its inner fragrance, similar to my Granny's rose perfume, beckoning me closer. I held up the rosary, it was golden with pale pink beads linked together. I purchased and stuffed it in my green leather bag with other "important" things: a sixpence and rose quartz that were gifted to me, a tiny sculpture of the Buddha for protection, a crumpled napkin for unexpected tears, a mesh bag with another rosary from my Granny that was black chain with translucent red, heart-shaped beads, two halves of a walnut shell with pictures drawn on them (gifted from a friend), my tiny sketchbook, pens, and some money. I don't think I even had a phone. I would get phone calls on the shared landline mostly, and there was a time limit on that. My grandma would joke about how many numbers it would take to dial me, and I would coil the cord between my fingertips and laugh.

I visited her earlier today with my daughter Florence, the one who I named appropriately after the most magical place in the world. The place that brought me the happiest, most adventurous and free days of my life, and the greatest artworks and landscapes that would ever grace my eyes and inspire my work. I remember thinking at the time, that if everything were to go to shit (which, surprise--it did!) at least my boots had touched this enchanted ground once, and no one could ever take that from me. There, I collected souvenirs you couldn't find in a rooftop Catholic tiki hut: the soft fabric of the seat that held me on bus rides, the other tired riders who later became my lifelong friends, the nuances of the scene before me, and every moment thereafter. These were things that no one could steal or buy or borrow, or fit into a mesh bag. And yet, one waft from a little pink box and it was as if my grandmother had been conjured up from halfway across the world, Gramma Tala-style. So how is it, that a memory is so intangible that it cannot be stolen from us (we won't get into lobotomies here, you contrarian *wink*) and yet are real enough to be able to escape from the shell of an object that contains it via some sensory experience? Could it be, that there is an alchemical reaction, somewhere between the moment of human perception and the object being perceived, one that brings it closer to physical reality?

When I was in college, around the same time I went to Italy, was when I first became fascinated by the idea of human experience itself. In my earnest research starting with synesthesia, I came upon a branch of philosophy that focused on exactly that: phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, French phenomenologist, became one of my idols (among him were: Kant, Kandinsky, Goethe, Heidegger, and more). Everything from The Birth of Tragedy to The Origin of the Work of Art, I studied and indulged in the ideas that blossomed from my research. Like in one section of The Origin of a Work of Art, where Heidegger explores the notion of objecthood, literally asking the question: what is a thing? and showing that a thing is never just its material, but the world it gathers as residue, dust. A jug is not only clay, but water and thirst, hands and lips, the whole scene of drinking. Proust showed the same truth with his madeleine: a cookie that was not just the components of a baked good--flour, sugar, eggs, butter--but a temporary portal to his entire childhood. In that way, the pink box in my palm is a time machine disguised as a pretty trinket. The genie bottle might be the ultimate “thing” — dormant until a hand reaches for it, invisible until breath or touch ignites it. On its own, it’s just glass, just ornament. But once activated, it releases a world, collapsing time and space into smoke and story. Isn’t that what Proust’s cookie did, and what my little pink box does, each time I lift the lid and the smell of roses--unmistakable--floods my senses?

Marcel Proust, Overture, Swann’s Way, 1913

Now, the open box I hold in my hands transports us back to the place where I first found it. It takes time and folds it in half like paper, collapsing whatever was in the middle and creating a portal between past-present-future. You know we have been standing in this threshold for a while, right? From this spot, we can see the pathways of the past converge into one point, and open up to meet us again before we also turn and look at the same image of the future. It can all be so clear from this vantage point. Proust had his little cake, soaked in tea, and suddenly he was no longer in his chair but back in the arms of childhood. I had my little box, soaked in the fragrance of my beloved grandmother. The moment I opened it, the years disappeared entirely: collapsing the miles between Rome and Chicago, between twenty and thirty-six. A thing is never just a thing—it is the weight of what it carries, the way it insists on being more than its shape or substance. We open the hinge and see a rosary, yes, but close your eyes and a whole garden may bloom. My grandmother’s roses, their perfume thick and forgiving. The lilac bushes that surrounded her house, healthy and tall, forming an obstacle course of branches in the winter for us, and a lush, intoxicating forest of blooms every spring. The purple long-stemmed roses my other grandma, Rosalynn, once sent for my birthday, and the way she cried every time she left us. The first bouquet (daisies) a boy ever gave me. The tiny pink blossoms that would scatter across the pool at night in Texas, drifting little rafts of tenderness between myself and my then-husband. And finally, the hypnotic way my Granny would twist a single leaf between her fingers, singing and holding me in the sunlight, always erasing my pain, my fear. All those petals pressed into a single scent, explode into the air at once. The genie bottle has been opened. And just as quickly, roses give way to sunflowers (my mother's favorite flower)—endless fields of them, golden faces turning toward the sky as I ride a bus through the hills of Tuscany.

Face pressed against a glass frame, the scene of flowers in Italy hit me as when I first rode the coach bus in Barcelona. By 19 years old my own two eyes had really only seen as far as Florida and Texas. And I was so young for those trips I could hardly remember them. We went to Tennessee, Alabama, Wisconsin Dells once, and then I studied for a summer in Milwaukee, which felt far for a teen but is actually hilariously only an hour away. I hadn't even been to New York or the West Coast by the time I turned 20 the summer I left for Cortona. I took it all in step-by-step: first, the very idea of even going to another country (woah), then riding a plane plus the whole experience of a layover, mini versions of American products, unknown languages, and learning what duty-free stores are (double woah). Then you get to the most spectacular part of all, which in my opinion is literally just seeing the soil of another place for the first time. We know the earth is round, and huge, and there are places and people on the other side (same way we know other planets exist), but to a person who has hardly traveled across their own country, a trip abroad might as well be a trip to Mars. So my eyes were glued open and my mouth was glued shut the day I left the airport in Spain. And it was the same way when I was riding that coach bus in Italy. The bus with the squiggly patterned fabric, appropriately resembling an explosion of confetti, across the fields of Camucia up to Cortona. I was living entirely in a dream world set in the flowery fields of Tuscany, and my memory was branded with it permanently, much the same my traumas later were. But the body keeps the score, you know, both good and bad experiences are recorded within our physiology. And you would think the things were layered on top of each other in a neat stack, right? But time is not linear and human experience doesn't work that way. I sit at my dark computer desk, a TV plays cartoons in the background and my daughter eats her snacks, singing between bites. I see: screen, keyboard, open fields, flowers, leaves. I hear a child in the distance. Then more leaves, lilacs dancing between my eyes and the sun, and my Granny. Not just in sight, but it scent, in sound, in nuance, all of it. She is there forever holding me and singing songs in her native language. I am sitting at my computer and curled in her lap much like the rosary in this box, afternoon sun warming us, always. I am sitting on a bus in two countries, staring out the same window, always. I am hearing "Mama, look!" and I am screaming "Mom, please help me" all at once. You must know what I mean by now...you must have experienced this collapse of time before, no?

Summer of 2018, I became pregnant with my daughter Florence and left my abusive marriage before the trees started to yellow. That September, hurricane Florence landed on the East Coast and swept across the news, as I drove West away from my own storm. I remember sitting on a hotel bed in Dayton, just soaking in the moment before slipping into a silky green dress with long, bell sleeves and ties I could wrap twice around my waist. I was headed to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as their special guest, since I was tapped to do a project for them in the spring. I felt like a princess and a peasant all at once, a feeling that was all too familiar. In this moment, I was a representation of physical beauty in this stunning dress while feeling like I was dying on the inside, so lonely and uncertain about the future as I waded through the onset of divorce while pregnant. I didn't even have to meet with anyone that night and wear my mask for socializing professionally. I got to play the role of invisible observer (my favorite) while taking in a beautiful show and unforgettable evening. I could get lost in the clouds of my installation dreams for that space, which I definitely did. But even still, if I paid too much attention, thought too much about my situation, looked too closely at the couples and their smiles, their hands around each other, I would panic. So I left early.

The next day was the opening celebration for my permanent piece installed at the Woodbourne-Centerville Public Library near Dayton, Ohio. My oldest daughter, Felicity, and my mother were there. I spent a lot of time talking to my mom about baby name ideas while we were on the road, and I remember hoping it was a girl because it was on that trip that the universe whispered my daughter's name (Florence) into my heart, much the same way as it had happened with her older sister one Texas night, our feet in that pool once flooded with flowers. I am not sure if it was a subconscious nudge from the news, or the branding of Italy on my memory, but it had to be Florence. Paradise city girl, wild storm, the one who saved my life. She was the reason I ultimately forced myself to have the courage to leave a very unhealthy, toxic, and dangerous situation.

Felicity at the ribbon cutting at the WCPL, Ohio, Fall 2018

Interestingly, Florence (the place and person) acts as a pair of bookends to an important chapter in my life: my twenties. When I went to Italy, I had just turned 20 the month prior. And the day after I stepped back onto American soil, was when I met my girls' father, and we had a relationship that lasted almost ten years. When I gave birth to Flo, my mother and Granny flanking the hospital bed, and my recently-deceased grandma Rosalynn floating above us, that was the summer I turned 30 and our very long divorce process was finally over. It was a life-changing year: one that included finding my freedom, our first own apartment, and ironing out my life after a long period of suffering. Florence saved me in many ways. So there you have it, my twenties, started by Florence the place and finished by Florence the person, the memory of it all tucked inside a magical pink box. It's remarkable, isn't it, the way an object so small can house a memory so large. Maybe a huge portion of my life will live in that box until one day, long after I am gone, someone finds it in a garage sale bin or on a shelf at a thrift store and fills it with their own memory, dust and all.

*Author's note: This post was published Aug 31 then redacted for additional edits and re-published Sept 3, 2025

Entry 6: Little Pink Box

Entry 5: The Souvenir Shelf (Part 1)