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.

Van’s Tennis Shoes

Rubber and new cloth and dyed canvas; oily creosote from the railroad ties behind the factory store. I got a brand new pair of red Van’s tennis shoes every fall, to wear with my tights and dresses and later, my brothers’ hand-me-down play clothes. At kindergarden recess, I would untie the laces so that I could watch them flutter toward me and away as I went back and forth on the swings. I always needed help getting them retied, but no amount of scolding could prevent me from doing it again. No other new shoes smell quite the same as Van’s–I’m glad to see that they’re still around.

Edited to add: Since I’d planned a trip home, I looked up the address of the old factory. I drove by there yesterday, and it’s no longer Van Doren Rubber Company, but you can see the bricked in space where we used to enter the store.