Hiatus

Stocking up on new scents for the New Year. Please suggest your seasonal favorites in the comments, and take deep breaths to make more memories for the future. Cheers, and check back soon.

Wet Paper Towel

The smooth recycled brown ones on a roll (clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk, rrrriiip) which were a feature of my grade school existence. Mixed in with the wet pulpy, earthy scent is the promise of summer coming soon, and a faint remnant of some kind of cleanser they used on the tiles and mirrors of the 4th grade girls’ bathroom. We’d thoroughly wet the paper towels in the sink and then press them against the walls so that we could make little origami boxes, scratching a hole in the middle of the sheet before folding so that we’d have a place to blow into the finished product to inflate it. We’d hold out as long as we could, but I doubt any of those little boxes lasted more than a minute before we’d slam our hands down to pop them before going back out to recess.

Me-n-Ed’s Pizza

Whenever my brothers’ baseball team won an important game, the whole team would be taken to Me-n-Ed’s Pizza Parlour. The dark wood and barely windowed medieval-ish space of my memory is a far cry from their current vaulted and bright pizzeria design, but it has been a few years. When I remember walking in the door, the exciting circus smell of cotton candy is followed by the mouthwatering aroma of thin pepperoni slices, and later a blast of peppery rootbeer making wooden wind-chime sounds in an ice-filled clear or red plastic glass. The long table of rowdy kids would go through several pies and pitchers of soda in no time at all, and as the team’s unofficial mascot, I got to sit with the boys rather than my parents, who were decompressing with the other adults in the relative quiet of the far side of the restaurant.

Craving cotton candy, I once rode my bike to the restaurant on a summer weekday, but they told me that the machine was broken and I left disappointed. The fuzzy pink smell is always related to pizza for me, even now.

Guest Post: Apricot and Hopsalot

From Joanna, who has no blog, but a keen nose for detail:

“I’m not normally fond of the industrial strength air fresheners you find in many public restrooms: overly sweet, chemical floral scents that only intensify the aromas they’re designed to cover up. So when I first walked into the women’s restroom of my old neighborhood library and heard the soft hiss of the air freshener dispenser, I was unprepared for the immediate rush of nostalgia and longing I felt. It smelled sort of like a cheap, chemical-interpretation of vanilla with a very sweet, slightly fruity undertone. And then I knew: Apricot. Not the fruit, but the doll. Like all of the Strawberry Shortcake dolls, Apricot was scented; like all of the others, she smelled very sweet and artificial and nothing like the fruit she was named for.

Apricot was one of Strawberry Shortcake’s buddies. She was younger than most of the others, and she had white curly pigtails and freckles and a soft hat and a smiling, pink-cheeked pet bunny named Hopsalot, and I secretly longed to be her. I desperately wanted to be so adorable that I was irresistible, to be the child who strangers want to hug and older kids want to look after. And now, when I smell the air freshener at the library, I realize that part of me still longs to be so adorable and perfect that everyone will love me, and then everything will be okay.

And I still want curly pigtails.”

Awwww. Thanks, Joanna!

*If you’d like to send me a submission, use the titleofthisblog, no spaces between the words, at gmail.com to contact me. Thanks to dana-elizabeth for the image.

Simple Green

Apparently, biodegradable, non-toxic Simple Green is the hairstylist’s secret weapon in the fight against blobs of color that somehow land on one’s forehead during the course of an appointment. The soapy, minty, eucalyptol smell with echoes of Listerine transported me back to college, where we used Simple Green to rinse off the boats (Lido 14, Shields, or North American 40) after sailing them for a class, a race, or a trip to Catalina.

Subsequent waves of nostalgia followed: the greasy aroma of hamburgers and beer after the Wet Wednesday races, the tang or brackish scent of the small harbor where the boats were docked, the race we sailed in fog so dense we all took a turn as lookout on Avanti’s bow, and the times when I was greeted with a chorus of “Saaaam!”s when I finally met or rejoined the group after various absences whose purpose I can no longer remember. I confess that I bought a gallon of Simple Green years ago almost solely because it conjured up these and so many more memories, although the added bonus is that it works as well on land as it did on water.

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

You either get the reference, or you don’t. I can only imagine the solace that the delicate, sprightly bergamot smell would offer to a Starfleet Captain who is lightyears from home, but I’d guess it’s similar to the immediate relaxation and pleasure that I feel when I inhale over my own cup of tea. The feeling of comfort and youthfulness might be because bergamot is the same flavoring that’s used in Trix cereal, but whatever the reason, it’s nice to have such a reliable talisman to call upon in times of unease or fatigue.