Swarva ad: I Got Replaced by the New Woman at Church

My best friend who got me through my husband's funeral replaced me with a woman she met THREE weeks ago. Twenty years I've sat next to Barbara at church. Every Sunday, same pew, same seat. But back in May I walked in and the seat she ALWAYS saves for ME was being saved for Diane I didn't say a word. I found another seat, and for the first time in twenty years I felt like a visitor in my own church. If I'm honest, that feeling didn't start with the seat. Lately I've had this sense, and I hate even saying it, that the women at my church would rather I wasn't there. At 72 this isn't the life I pictured. I pictured being the one people came to. A full table. A phone that rang. Instead, all I've really got is church. After my husband passed, St. Mark's became the one thing I could count on. Twenty-six years there. Weddings, funerals, baptisms. I know everyone in that building. I know Stuart's mother just went into a nursing home, and that Sandra's son has stopped calling. Nobody has ever been rude to me there. I want to be clear about that. It's just that somewhere along the way — and I couldn't tell you the year — I went from being somebody people looked for when they walked in, to somebody they didn't even notice. Take coffee hour a few weeks back. My sister had just had a scare with her heart, and I'd carried it around all week without telling a soul. Then I found Sandra by the coffee urn. She'd come to me about her son more times than I could count, so I went over and started opening up to her. I was maybe four sentences in when I saw her eyes flick over my shoulder, to the door, where the Hendersons were coming in with their new daughter-in-law. "Oh, hold that thought, hon," she said, and touched my arm, and went. I stopped mid-sentence with my mouth still a little open. My face went hot. It felt like the whole room was watching me. There I was, just standing there, on my own, in a room full of people I've known for twenty years. Yet I felt out of place, like I was the only person in that room nobody would have missed. Then there's Sunday breakfast. After the second service, the same twenty or so always go to the Pancake House on Route 9. It's not organized and nobody gets invited. You can just tell who's going, because they hang back in the aisle with their coats on, waiting for each other. I tell myself I'm not much of a breakfast person. But if I'm being brutally honest, every now and then I'll stand in that aisle with my coat on a little longer than I need to, hoping one of them turns around and says, "Ruth, you coming?" Nobody ever has. It's like that with everything. I've offered to host the women's circle four years running. It's been at Judy's FOUR years running. I tell myself this is just what 72 looks like. Diane showed up in April. Sixty-eight, widowed, moved down from Ohio to be near her son. I couldn't stand her from the start. Not because of anything she did. She was lovely. That was the problem. She remembered everyone's name, she laughed at everything, and of course, she smelled like fresh daisies. Within a month everyone loved her. The Hendersons would hang around after the service just to talk to her, standing at the end of what used to be my pew like they had nowhere else to be. The youth pastor laughed at her jokes the way you only laugh when you mean it. People just wanted to be near her. And I couldn't work out why. I remember everyone's name too. I laugh at their jokes. I've been lovely to that church for twenty-six years. Then came the pancake breakfast. I'd baked thirty blueberry muffins for it, the way I have every year. Diane had brought muffins too. Blueberry, on a white plate. Hers were gone in thirty minutes. I watched Bill Henderson eat three of them standing by the urn. I asked her, being polite, what recipe she used. "Oh, it's just the church cookbook, honey," she said. "Page forty-one." Page forty-one is my recipe. I've made it for thirty years. Mine were on the next table over, lid off. Thirty of them. People walked past them to get to hers. I went outside and sat on the bench at the edge of the parking lot, the one by the memorial garden where nobody goes, and I sat there crying with my hands in my lap, thinking, what is it about me? Then somebody sat down next to me. Diane. She put her purse on her lap and looked out at the parking lot. Neither of us said anything. After a minute, she asked, "Can I tell you something nobody told me for six years?" "Okay," I said. "After my husband died, my sister stopped staying over. She used to come for a whole week every summer. Had her own drawer in the guest room and everything. "Then one summer it was three days, and the summer after that she got a room at the Hampton Inn nearby. She blamed her back. Said the guest bed was too soft. I even bought a new mattress, thinking that would fix it, yet she never did sleep on it." I didn't say anything. "Nobody said a word to me about it for six years. Then one day I was in for a checkup, and the nurse taking my blood pressure, a young girl who'd worked in a nursing home before, asked me, very casually, what soap I used at home. I told her, and asked why. Then she said, 'Ma'am, has anyone ever talked to you about nonenal?'" "About what?" I asked. Diane almost smiled. "That's exactly what I said to her." She turned to face me. "Ruth. It's an oil. After sixty or so, your skin starts making it. Everyone's does, more or less. It sits on the skin and it doesn't come off. And it has a smell. A stale, musty scent. You'd know it if you've ever walked into a nursing home." "Regular soap wasn't made for it. You could shower three times a day, it makes no difference. It builds up. It gets on your sheets, your sweaters, the cushion in your pew." "I've never smelled anything on myself," I said. "No, that's the thing, you can't. Your nose gave up on it years ago. Everyone else's didn't." I felt something go cold in my stomach. I wanted her to be wrong. But Diane kept going. "After that appointment I went home and looked it all up," she said. "Turns out the Japanese have known about it for decades. They've even got a word for it, kareishu." She reached into her purse and pulled out a small orange box. "And there's a soap they use over there, made with persimmon. The persimmon breaks the oil down at the source, where regular soap just slides over it." "You're telling me I smell?" I said. "I'm telling you I did. For six years." She looked at me. "And I'm telling you now because I noticed it on you my first Sunday, and I've been trying to find the words to tell you ever since." I couldn't even look at her. I just stared out at the parking lot. "I'm sixty-eight," she said. "I've been where you're sitting. That's why I came out." She set the orange box on the bench between us. "Two weeks," she said. "Then you'll know if I'm right." She left the box and went back inside. I want to be honest. I wasn't grateful. I was furious. Who was she, two months in, to sit down next to me and tell me I smell? I nearly put the box in the trash on the way to the car. Once I got home though, curiosity got the better of me, so I looked up nonenal. And to my horror, it's real. A Japanese paper identified it back in 2001. But luckily, the persimmon part is real too. Just like Diane said, the tannins in the fruit bind to the oil and break it down. That night I stood in my bathroom and looked at the bar of soap I'd been using. Plain white, worn down. I'd been buying the same one since before my kids were born. I put it in the trash and opened the box she gave me. Swarva, it said on the front, in big letters. Inside was a bar of soap. Orange, and it smelled nicer than I expected. For the first week I couldn't tell any difference. I nearly gave up on it. Until the second Sunday, when something small happened. There's a part of the service where everyone turns and shakes hands with the people around them. Barbara turned around and, instead of the handshake, she hugged me. A proper one. She hadn't done that in years. "It's good to see you, Ruth," she said, like she meant it. The Sunday after that, I was hanging back in the aisle with my coat on, out of habit, when Bill Henderson, one of the Pancake House crowd, turned around with his keys in his hand. "You coming, Ruth?" he said. "We'll get a bigger table." When we got there, Diane waved me over to sit next to her. I'd spent two months hating that woman, and she was the only one who'd said a word. I told them about my sister. All of it. And people actually listened. On Tuesday, Judy called to ask if the women's circle could be at my house in August. She'd never asked before. I said yes before she'd even finished the question. Last Sunday was the Fourth of July breakfast. I made my muffins again. Thirty. I brought the tin home empty. Folded inside was a note from Barbara. "Can you make these for Judy's birthday lunch? Everyone's asking." Over twenty years, and nobody had ever asked me to make anything. I'm telling you all this because I know I'm not the only one. If people have seemed a little different around you lately. If you're left out more than you used to be and can't put your finger on why. You've probably done what I did, and told yourself people are busy, that it's nothing, that this is just what getting older looks like. But it might not be your age at all. After sixty your body changes in ways nobody warns you about, and one of them is an oil on your skin that ordinary soap was never made for. Doctors don't bring it up. Nobody talks about it. And the bar in your shower has no idea you're not thirty anymore. The soap Diane gave me is the one I use now. It's called Swarva, and it's made with the same persimmon they use in Japan. Turns out I'm nowhere near the first to find it, they've sold over half a million bars. So if you've started to feel like people keep you at arm's length and you can't work out why, there's nothing wrong with you. Your body changed. Your soap didn't. Try changing it, and see how people are with you.