12/20/2025
I saw it the way you see a ghost you arenât expecting; not head-on, not announced, but out of the corner of your eye, tucked between brighter bottles that promised miracles.
Corn Huskers Lotion.
It wasnât nostalgia that reached me first. It was recognition.
I hadnât smelled it since 1997, but my body knew before my brain caught up. My hand was already reaching for it, already lifting the bottle, turning it so the label faced me like proof that memory doesnât fade. It waits.
Standing there in the pharmacy aisle, fluorescent lights humming overhead, I was suddenly seven years old again. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. In the quiet way memory actually works. The way it slips in without asking.
That smell wasnât âlotion.â It was work.
It was hands that knew dirt and wire and feed sacks. Hands that fixed things instead of replacing them. Hands that smelled faintly of hay, motor oil, and effort - and then, always, Corn Huskers Lotion rubbed in at the end of the day. Not for luxury. For survival. For skin cracked by weather, labor and love.
It was my grandfather, Monroe Robinson.
The same grandfather who got me into rabbits. The same man whose presence taught me that tending something living, whether it had fur, feathers, fields, or family, was a responsibility, not a hobby.
I stood there longer than I meant to. Long enough to realize how strange it is that a life can be carried inside a scent, and how grief doesnât always arrive as sadness. Sometimes it shows up as certainty. I knew exactly what it would smell like. I didnât need to open the bottle. I could have described it blindfolded.
Buying it felt less like a choice and more like a recognition of inheritance. At the register, the cashier rang it up like it was nothing. Just another bottle. Just another transaction.
âIf I donât see you, have a Merry Christmas,â I remember her saying.
âHmm? Oh. Thank you.â
My mind was somewhere else.
She couldnât see that I was carrying more than lotion out of the store. I was carrying a memory that had outlived a man. A bridge across decades. A reminder that love leaves traces, not just in stories or photographs, but in the smallest, most ordinary things.
When I got to the car, I opened it and closed my eyes.
And there he was.
Not frozen in time. Not idealized.
Just present.
I understood something then. We donât remember people because they are gone. We remember them because they are still here, whether in scent, in habit, in the things we reach for without knowing why.
Corn Huskers Lotion wasnât on that shelf by accident.
Neither was I.
CEB
