Soap Strata

My mother, a child of the Great Depression, was thrifty in a way I often found absurd. She wasn’t stingy and could be extremely generous, but she hated waste. She could make a meal out of scraps of food that we more careless people would have tossed before ordering take-out. Whenever a bar of bath soap had been worn down to a sliver, it ended up in a soap dish. Sometimes these pieces were pressed together and shaped into a ball, but more often they accumulated in a pile that soon looked like a miniature model of geologic strata.

When my mother died in 2018, I found myself collecting my own slivers of soap in what now seems like an unconscious ritual of mourning. “You never know when you might need this,” my mom used to say about some battered old pot or other worn out artifact. Now that I’m almost constantly washing my hands with a thin stratum of soap, I know how right she was.