Last night, Mama and I made our usual route around the big metropolis of Mebane.  Oh, occasionally, we’ll head to the big city of Burlington (have to pack a lunch:) and get a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee or a Zack’s Hotdog, one of her favorites, but usually, it’s just around Mebane.  We ride “out to the Walmart”, maybe check out a little Dollar General, we check out people’s yards, maybe wash the car, you just never know when we might show up at your door (or judge your landscaping).

One of the things I always remember about my Mama is her lipstick. She never went anywhere without her lipstick.  Growing up, I was not a big makeup wearer and I can still hear her saying, “At least put on a little lipstick” as if to say “My gosh, you look like the walking dead” which I often did but it would just go in one ear and out the other along with most of my education.  But the other thing about the lipstick is we’d find her lip blotting imprints everywhere, those little lipstick kisses, on church bulletins, receipts, napkins, you name it.  You could always tell where Mama had been.

When Mama started with this disease or when it started taking her over, we went through a phase much like the pocketbook where she had to have her lipstick.  We’d buy tubes at a times and they would disappear constantly, we never knew what she was doing with them.  One day we’re probably going to find a nest of lipsticks and pocketbooks, shoes and sweaters and jewelry, all of which have gone missing.  But with the lipstick, she’d have to put it on and eventually it didn’t matter if it was straight or not, she just had to have it.  Then the stage changed to where she’d ask if she had any on and we started saying yes, you look beautiful, and that was all she needed. She didn’t even check to see if she had it on or not.  Finally, the lipstick went away and hasn’t been mentioned for probably years … until last night.

In my car, I had a new tube of lipstick I’d just bought (my discontinued Maybelline 365 Sugared Honey that I had to hunt for I might add and I’d bought three tubes when I finally found it) but I had put it in my console of the car.  Well, she saw that lipstick and that was all she wrote.  While we were sitting in a drive through, I look over and she’s going to town on MY Maybelline 365 Sugared Honey, putting it on quite well I’ll have you know, and  I laughed and she laughed.  Well, she put that darn lipstick on 7 times before we got home and I saw her reach down into a pocket of my car and lo and behold, she found an old receipt and had to blot (no comments on the content of that purchase – it was all Dave, except the V8, the V8 was mine).

I guess some things, silly or small or seemingly insignificant, are ingrained in there forever.  I’m going to miss Mama’s lipstick… I might hang on to this tube and that little receipt for a while:)