Victor Hazan of Birthday Presents

This post was written by Victor Hazan and originally published on Facebook.

A gift from Marcella. After Marcella died, I made very few changes, I wanted our home and her things in it to look as they did when left. I have maintained the geraniums in the terrace and the orchids on the Japanese chest, and there have always been fresh flowers in her favorite vase, an early Art Nouveau piece from Austria. I visited her closet from time to time to breathe her scent from her clothes, but I moved nothing, until yesterday. She kept some of her notebooks in the closet, she kept them in many places in fact, and I was missing a section from the manuscript that I am working on. I moved things off shelves and I dug into drawers. At the bottom of one drawer I found two sealed gift boxes of perfume. They were men’s cologne, one of them a long time favorite of mine, Terre d’Hermes, the other, in a Lalique bottle, new to me.
Marcella died three weeks before my birthday, which she usually celebrated with a gift of her incomparable green lasagne, but last year she may have felt too feeble to produce it, and evidently planned to give me cologne instead. I also found her notebooks. Victor.

November 23, 2014 · Longboat Key, FL
Photo chosen by Gustiamo