Memory in a Bottle

The flowers are breathtaking. Mummy will love them.
I slide them, one stalk after the other into the empty perfume bottle I found in the bottom drawer, along with the other things she didn't throw away.

Daddy said mummy was too sentimental; she never threw out anything.
“For the memories, she says. But tell me, what memory can a wrinkled piece of paper, broken jewelry and empty bottles possibly hold?”
“Nana,” he told me always, “ Tell your mother that she can't hold on to things this way. It's not good for her.”
I'd love to tell him to follow his own advice, now. It's not good for him either.
I fill the bottle with water and the ghost of a fragrance wafts up my nose.
My eyes fill and I blink them away.
She wore this fragrance everywhere, on everything, in suffocating proportions.
Even daddy understood that it was necessary for her.
It was the same one her mother had worn before her.
“It keeps me close to her,” she explained to me on one of those nights when her body wanted sleep and her mind wanted to dwell.
“She applied henna every week, made her hair every other day and poured this perfume into her bath water. You smelled her before you saw her. She suffocated everyone with it!”
“Like you suffocate us with it!”
Mummy laughed and even the breeze paused to listen. It was one of the few times she openly discussed her mother.
I never got to meet the woman. A lot of what I know about her is from stories daddy told me and Aliyu's little snatches of memory.
She was a feisty lady way ahead of time. The first woman to ride a motorcycle in their village and the first to deal her brother-in-law a much deserved black eye.
She was also the first person mummy was forced to let go of. Daddy said it changed her, as if a part of her soul went with her mother.
What remained kept her alive every way she could. She preserved every memory and kept all items that didn't go to charity.
Her perfumes, some ceramic plates from her wedding gifts, a few pictures, her jewelry box, her well-worn Quran and her prayer mat.
All these aside the plates and the Qur’an were kept in the bottom drawer of her vanity. The plates stayed on the dining table where they served as centrepieces. Aliyu took the Qur’an and glued its torn pages back together.
He had grandma for the first five years of his life and loved her fiercely. He had me for seventeen.
I wipe the bottle down one last time and place it on the window sill, beside a small wooden box.
Nestled among strings of beads, old scrunchies, plastic bangles, dried flowers and empty lip gloss containers, are pictures. From when I was a baby in frills and flounces, a tween in plaid skirts and scruffy boots.
I fish out the latest, taken just months ago. I'm in rubber wellingtons and the old t-shirt I borrowed from Aliyu, proudly holding up two small tomatoes.
They were the first things that I grew that did not die. These orchids are the second. Although, I didn't get to keep them alive. Mummy did.
That was her way of keeping me alive.
I slide the picture underneath the bottle. It's not much but it'll do.
Orchids in a bottle, this is my way of getting her to let me go.
Th