“My granddaughter pulled back from my hug. Then I heard her whisper: ‘Why does Grandma smell kind of… musty?’”

Thanksgiving, four o’clock. The turkey was resting, the whole family was at the table, and I was waiting at the foot of the stairs with my arms open, the way I have for every one of Ava’s sixteen Thanksgivings.

“There’s my girl!”

She stepped into the hug. And then she stepped out of it, a beat too early, with a quick polite smile, and looked past me at her mother.

I kept smiling. I’m good at that. A minute later, from the dining-room doorway, I heard her whisper to Beth: “Mom, why does Grandma smell kind of… musty?”

In the hallway I lifted the cuff of my cardigan to my nose. I couldn’t smell a thing. That was the worst part.

I shower every single day. I have since I was a girl. After Thanksgiving I showered twice a day. At the end of my checkup I asked my doctor about it, quietly. He closed his folder and said, kindly, “Everyone’s scent changes at your age, Margaret.”

So I went to war with it.

Joan is 74, a retired principal, and the most upright woman at our church. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, her two grandkids ran across the fellowship hall and hugged her around the waist. They held on. They kept holding on.

I asked her, as quietly as I’ve ever asked anything: “Your grandkids used to give you quick hugs too. What changed?”

She had me over for coffee. At her kitchen table she tilted her head and asked one question.

“Every single time,” I said. “How did you know?”

She set her mug down and leaned across the table.

Joan had been through exactly this two years before. Here’s what she had me write down, and what I’ve since read for myself:

“It’s not you, Margaret,” she said, and put her hand on my arm. “It’s what you dry with.”

I cried a little in her kitchen. Not because it was bad news. Because it wasn’t me.

Joan walked me to her bathroom and put a towel in my hands. It was heavy, much heavier than mine, and plush in a way that had nothing slick about it. I pressed my palm into it and it just took the water.

“One hundred percent long-staple Turkish cotton,” she said. “That’s all it is. And it’s OEKO-TEX certified. I checked.”

The brand is MIORA. I went home and read every word on their site the way Joan reads a lunch menu.

Read the tag. If it says polyester, microfiber or “cotton-rich,” or nobody can tell you what it was finished with, put it back.

That was Walt, from his armchair, looking at me over his glasses. Forty-nine years married and he still thinks he can talk me out of things.

“One swap,” I told him. “Not a new laundry routine.”

And the money? I had been spending about $60 a month on soap, softener, scent beads and candles, covering something I couldn’t even smell. The Switch was $149.95, once, with free shipping. Less than three months of covering it up, and it changed the one thing that touches my whole body every morning.

The tree was lit by the stairs. Beth and the kids came through the door at dusk, and I said it the way I always do: “There’s my girl!”

Ava stepped into the hug, put both arms all the way around me, and rested her cheek on my shoulder. And she stayed there.

I closed my eyes. Over Ava’s shoulder, Beth caught my eye and smiled.

Later Ava came down from her shower with wet hair, wrapped in one of the bath towels. “Grandma, where did you get these?”

It wasn’t me. It was the towel I dried with.