A borrowed scarf as beach cover, face mask and token of love across eternity.
Weeks after the neurologist diagnosed my Dutch mother with Alzheimer’s, I left the Netherlands on what was supposed to be a three-month journey to Southeast Asia.
My mother would be well cared for in my absence. She was only seventy-three and could still manage most things on her own. My brother, who lived a short bicycle ride away, would do her groceries in the car she was suddenly no longer allowed to drive now that her inner roads were blocked. Two days a week, she would receive state-funded help at home for assistance with meals. Friends and siblings would drop by for company in the weekends. I figured that my presence in the Netherlands, where I did not have a home, would become more urgent as my mother’s disease progressed, so I wanted to make that trip to Southeast Asia while I still had the chance.
It was February 2020, however, and I wouldn’t be able to return and see my mother for nearly a year.
I like telling people I carry all my possessions on my back. The statement creates instant intrigue or admiration, as though I’ve climbed the Kilimanjaro and reached the top. The truth is that I live out of a backpack and rent a storage space where I’ve stowed away my other stuff, my stylish yet impractical Parisian clothes, my forty boxes of books, my ergonomically-designed Scandinavian desk chair, my childhood diaries and novel drafts, my yoga mat, and far more than I care to retrieve. Since the winter of 2019, when my husband and I lost our home in Paris, we’ve been traveling the world, staying in cheap accommodations, subletting apartments, and being a house guest or artist in residence.
My mother owned close to a hundred scarves, accumulated over decades. More than once, I called her love for scarves an obsession. Most scarves weren’t meant to protect her neck from the winter cold, but to keep her throat from showing her age. They were fashion accessories, expensive gifts to herself that she couldn’t always afford. During the last years of her life, she drew comfort from handling her collection, smoothing the fabrics and holding them to her face. But she wore only two pieces by then, a beige cashmere wrap and a smooth merino earth-toned square, switching between the two at random it seemed. She rarely left the house and wore them around her shoulders all day long. Even with the heat on high, my mother, underweight and inactive, was always cold.
In February 2020, when I was preparing for my trip to Southeast Asia—Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam—I browsed one part of my mother’s scarf collection, a neatly folded stack she kept in a wicker basket near the front door.
“May I borrow this one?” I asked, showing her the muslin scarf I’d selected.
She frowned, slid her reading glasses up her noise, and reached for the scarf with manicured hands. She sat on a black leather couch, cushioned by pillows, and I stood facing her like a lackey in front of an empress.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It will be so useful on my travels,” I added, “and you’re not wearing it anymore.”
In fact, I hadn’t seen it around her neck once. The scarf was brandless and made of inexpensive material; grey was not her color and cotton not her style. She’d probably been talked into buying the thing by a convincing salesperson. This happened often to my mother, who was as susceptible to compliments as a child is to sweets. When Alzheimer’s distorted her mind, years before her diagnosis, she became dangerously gullible, spending hundreds of euros a month on hairdressing products she never used.
“Please,” I said. “I’ll take good care of your scarf and give it back to you when I return.”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
I couldn’t tell whether the hesitance came from my mother or the disease. She was protective of what she owned and rightly so: What she owned, she had earned through decades of work that left her permanently stressed. Overall, she was a generous person, giving her children and grandchildren birthday presents and little extras during the year. But the disease that pushed her death forward had made her more defensive. It let her forget how useless her money and possessions would be to her after she died.
When you regularly lift your pack off the ground with one arm and hang it over your shoulders, when you carry your belongings on your back from place to place, you become demanding of each item that weighs you down. What I allow in my luggage must have a clear purpose or an undeniable meaning. It must cancel noise, for example, or soothe me with beauty. The ideal belongings offer me both—a solution and a story—while adding a minimum of mass. Circumstance and habit have made me into a minimalist.
Should I have told my mother how I wished to take a piece of her with me on the road? Or would that have reminded her too much of her mortality? She might not have believed me anyway. We both knew I wasn’t the sentimental type, and she’d grown highly suspicious of everyone’s motives. In her Alzheimer’s paranoia, we were all out to get her.
Her hesitance to lend me the scarf could have also been fueled by her sense of fashion. She probably disliked the scarf on me, considered the grey unflattering to my pale skin. In the past, she would have bluntly told me so, never shy to criticize the way I dressed, hoping I would learn from her commentary and improve my appearance. But now she lacked the words and coherence to tell me things outright.
She surely had an opinion, though. She always did. My mother and I argued about many subjects over the years, yet never more fervently than about society’s oppressive demands for female charm. To her it was common sense to spend excessive amounts of time, money, and energy on her looks. I saw it my feminist duty to defy impossible beauty standards.
I’m not as indifferent to my image as I’d like to be. I can find myself twirling in front of a mirror to judge whether a certain dress improves my shape. My mother, however, considered me neglectful. I was wearing the same old stuff all the time and stubbornly refused to invest in anti-wrinkle treatments even long after I’d turned thirty. And who on Earth was cutting my hair? There were times I tried to please her with my outfits, made an effort. And there were times I intentionally chose something I knew she would hate. Her refrain remained the same: “You could look a lot better if you tried.”
The last time I brought up the male gaze, the way brushed-up magazine covers pervert our expectations, the addictive quality of shopping, the commercial exploitation of our attention, and how her make-up routine confined her, I had unwittingly made her cry. It was easy to argue my case—I had studied philosophy and practiced debating—yet it was impossible to change her mind. Once, when she sat shivering on her black leather couch after dark, I handed her a wool blanket that she vehemently refused: Its colors clashed with her comfy fleece clothes. Although we expected no visitors that night, she was rather cold than unfashionable.
The day before my departure in February 2020, I asked my mother again whether I could please borrow her grey muslin scarf.
“I’ll replace it with a brand new one if anything happens to it,” I told her.
“All right,” she finally said, though reluctantly.
The first time I used her scarf was mere hours after we’d said goodbye. I was at the Helsinki airport where I witnessed hordes of Chinese travelers wearing facemasks. Travelers were also standing in line at the pharmacies to buy the maximum number of surgical masks allotted per passenger. What did they know that I did not?
Back then, Western doctors and governments still discouraged mask wearing for the public. Some even dared to call the use of facemasks superstition. But when I boarded the flight to Phuket and heard people around me cough, I took my mother’s scarf from my backpack and wrapped it around my nose and mouth. Better be safe than sorry. Did my mother’s obsession with scarves save my life?
Her grey muslin scarf became a beach wrap on Ko Phi Phi, a laptop sleeve in Siem Reap, a picnic blanket in Hoi An, a pillow to soften the airplane window during a stressful overnight flight, a strapless top on Isla Mujer, a hijab in Istanbul, a sunshade in Luxor, a bug screen in Wonju, and a bed sheet in Kyoto. Occasionally, in early winter in Milan or in Joshua Tree National Park, I wore it as an actual scarf around my neck to protect me from the cold.
When I tried to return the scarf to her a year after borrowing it, washed and folded, hoping she would gift it to me this time, she said it wasn’t hers. She still recognized me as her daughter, but the disease had disowned her of the scarf. She died five months later. The grey muslin scarf was forever mine to keep.
Claire Polders grew up in the Netherlands and now roams the world. She’s the author of four novels in Dutch, co-author of one novel for younger readers in English (A Whale in Paris, Simon & Schuster) and many short stories and essays. She’s working on her first memoir and a speculative novel. Her flash fiction collection Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press in 2025. Learn more at www.clairepolders.com or sign up for her Substack newsletter Wander, Wonder, Write to follow her on her journeys.
Images:
In the wind photo by studio ghaaf
Stacked scarves photo by Kelly Sikkema
Gray scarf photo by Karolina Grabowska
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