"The Smell of Paint"

Five years ago, my grandfather gave me a dusty envelope full of short stories written by his mother, Esther Kolpien. She wrote them when she was freshly out of college and living in upstate New York. Nearly a century ago, her nimble fingers danced on a typewriter and her thoughts spilled onto thin paper pages, and today my fingers grasp those same exact pages and sentiments. One of her pieces, “The Smell of Paint”, follows the story of a young married woman who has an affair, but then realizes she is making a huge mistake once she remembers how much she loves her husband.

When my great-grandmother was my age, she was in the thicket of women’s liberation. Along with this progression, the 1920s saw an explosion of innovation in fashion, art, and music. It turns out that 1920 wasn’t all that different from 2020. As a college student, my great-grandmother went to parties, flipped through magazines, and climbed out of her dorm room window after curfew to meet her boyfriend—the man who would end up being my great-grandfather. As a young woman, my great-grandmother loved shopping, reading, and dreamed of getting married and having a family of her own. As a feminist, my great-grandmother believed in equality, was steadfast in her values, and was never afraid to speak her mind. But at a time of such enormous cultural change, cradled between the first World War and the Great Depression, she never once lost sight of what was most important: love.

A hundred years since then, today, I stand here as a college student in New York, as a young woman, as a feminist. I go to parties, flip through fashion magazines, and stay up until 4 a.m. talking with my boyfriend. I love to shop and read, and I dream of getting married and building a home. And I know I’m not the only one. Today, we face a revival of the “Roaring Twenties.” Waves of cultural change crash every day, people are marching, social media is buzzing, and individuals are fighting more than ever. But now that we have been forced into isolation, self-reflection has a chance to settle within us. We are given a moment to remember what matters most: love. Love for family, love for friends, love for boyfriends and girlfriends, love for husbands and wives, love for our homes, love for our country, love for the little things that make the biggest impact on our lives. Love sends us little reminders all the time, all we have to do is stop and notice them. All we have to do is stop and notice “the smell of paint…”