The author with her brother, Kevin, and mother, Nancy, in Sandwich, Mass, 1981. (Courtesy)
One year, when I was 9 or 10 years old, I convinced my brother to pool our money so we could buy our mother a truly stellar Mother’s Day gift. Our dad took us, as he usually did before Mother’s Day, to a store at our local mall called Cherry, Webb & Touraine, or CWT for short. This was, in our opinion, the fanciest store in our neck of Southern New Hampshire and thus the perfect place to shop for special occasions for my mom.
Like the girl on a mission that I was, I led my dad and brother directly to the CWT makeup counter, where bright lights and glass cases displayed rows of slickly packaged eye shadows, blushes, mascaras and, what I was looking for, perfumes. Or rather, one perfume in particular: Estée Lauder’s White Linen.