boutique [boo-teek]: n. any small, exclusive business offering customized service; adj. of, designating, or characteristic of a small, exclusive producer or business.  

While I’m not certain if it’s slid into the overused category quite yet, the word “boutique” has seen its fair share of play over the years, and increasingly so thanks to the contemporary subculture otherwise known as hipsters. (If in doubt, blame the antler-laden, locally-crafted, explicitly ironic individuals in the room, right?). What can I say, some targets are drenched in red.

A few things that have adopted the adjectival form of boutique, and mostly-rightly so, include everything from creative agencies to coffee roasters to clothing stores (boutique boutiques) and/or clothing brands to hotels, and then some. Boutique has become, or rather morphed into, its own specific image. Connotatively speaking, it seems as though any one or any where or any thing can be boutique. It’s also now a verb. Which brings me to: words and content and content creation. 

Unless it’s already out there which I’m sure it is, we (our content creation agency) are adding boutique content creation to the list. Or even: content creation boutique. Because yeah, some of the best shit really does come in small, handmade batches. Including text. And our content, well, it’s boutique as fuck. We’re intimate and we get in there, we feel around and ruminate and refine. And… there are two of us. When you’ve met us both, you’ve met our entire content creation company in one fell swoop, and there’s something really sweet and straightforward about that. 

The boutique experience; an honest boutique. Boutique memories that can’t be touched. If it wasn’t before this journal entry, the word boutique is more than overused now. But still, I'm drawn to it, even if only by the sheer fact that it brings me back—to window-shopping with my mother; to any number of kitschy boutiques along some mouthy avenue; to my head full of long hair at my mother's hip, taking it all in.

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Of the boldly hued, brilliant, and spilling bouquet of fond mom-memories I have, one of them is of us walking together. Not necessarily with any destination in mind or in any one particular geographical area, though usually somewhere along the dense streets or quiet suburbs or chirping and jagged woods of North Jersey. 

Wherever and whenever the walks, my mother, who would have fared well in comedy, would try to match her left-right-left with mine. That is: sync the bob of her gait to my own rise and fall. It wouldn’t happen right away, but a few minutes into any walk I’d notice a familiar synchronization occurring in my periphery, then realize that the slight bounce in my stroll had been adopted. She knew this annoyed me, and that I’d immediately work to counter her parroting. Which she would then counter with a skip and a rematch, over and over until we’d both splintered into laughter, on a busy sidewalk, in the middle of everywhere.   

***

Thanks, boutique, for this sweet mom-memory. Because she lives over there and I live over here, and I miss her every day.