My husband dropped a container of foot powder in the bedroom, and the wintergreen-scented plume sent me reeling away and retching.

I have forbidden that smell in our house. My husband gave up his favorite wintergreen candies for me years ago, but secretes the foot powder in the bathroom, using it surreptitiously, thinking I don’t notice, that I don’t hold my breath as I wipe away traces of it each day after he’s gone to work.

This spill of powder, which he carelessly half-cleaned, unstoppered a whirlwind of memories of my mother wrapped in blankets, curled in on herself against the pain, slathering her arm and shoulder with greasy, reeking salve.

Over the next days, I gave away the books that the powder had infiltrated, vacuumed the carpet, lifted the carpet to vacuum white power from the crevices between the wooden floor boards, opened the windows despite the fact it was too cold to do so, vacuumed again, and changed the bag.

Yet the stench remained.

Wintergreen was the first of the smells that marked an illness that lasted more than half of my mother’s life. As soon as I could drive, I made grocery and salve runs for her. Fetched her medication. Didn’t make trouble. Got good grades. Spent as little money as possible. Things were tough enough already without adolescent foolishness.

Wintergreen gave way to Betadine on her shaven head and a legion of other post-surgical smells, and then, at home, an off-gassing vinyl easy chair that heated, vibrated, and thrummed. She was in that chair in a too-deep sleep the day I returned from work to an acrid haze in the kitchen, four potatoes in a pan reduced to blackened lumps, the water gone. I slid the pan from the burner to the countertop, which blistered and popped with a chemical tang; my stinging palm went red.

She was misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, and diagnosed again. Would she like another spinal tap? Another MRI? They might find something that would lead to a conclusive diagnosis, a name for her suffering; her case might make a good journal article. Years into the jabbing and sampling, she made the decision to decline further offers.

In the last two decades of her life, wintergreen crept back again in the floor polish that made the nursing home’s floors too slick for its residents and mingled repulsively with beef, overcooked corn, and Balmex.

My mother prevailed, arming herself with unfathomable grace, wry humor, and a weekly perfumed soak in a jetted bath. We went shopping for bodywash on her last birthday. She wanted a field of flowers; I talked her into harvest spices.

Did she sense she’d never open the bottle of bodywash? That I would take it home after my brother and I emptied her room? Her room, where a hummingbird hovered persistently outside the window as we packed her things, my brother certain that the bird was her, come back to bestow reassurance and blessing upon us.

Within the month, I opened the harvest spices, bathed in the memory of her, said my goodbyes.

The wintergreen persists in my bedroom, though the carpet is gone now, the floors scrubbed, the vacuum cleaner replaced. And nightly, it rises like the wraith of an orphaned child who wanders through a tangled, suffocating landscape, searching for flowers but finding none.

When not writing and reading, Janice E. Rodríguez is in the garden, where she moves her perennials around as if they were furniture, or in the kitchen working her way through a stack of cookbooks. Her published works include “Best Served Cold” in Evening Street Review, “Ground Control” in The Writing Disorder, “For Unto Us” in The Copperfield Review, “Pass/Fail” in JONAH magazine, and “Black Wednesday” in The Indiana Voice Journal. Find her online at janiceerodriguez.com.