Sat down to think about my grandmother’s pomegranate jelly—and believe me it was worth thinking about. Instead, unreasonably thinking about soap. I love soap; I have this thing. Not about germs, not about cleanliness, at least not directly. Passion I understand, for food or women or family or god for instance. But soap?
My fingers smell like garlic and I don’t mind. Washing dishes now and I don’t mind the garlic but am very disappointed by my dish soap. It’s orange. It’s neither sweet nor refreshing nor particularly clean-smelling nor bracing nor sexy nor powerful nor nothing. And yes I admit I ask too much of dish soap.
The hands, there’s something about the hands, thick and warm, heavy. The quiet the quiet and the stainless steel or porcelain or enamel. Steam and moment. Weight and water, naturally the water. The tingle-rush of blood and the white noise. What is it though, the feeling of satiety, the fullness? Why should puckered clean, stiff hands pressed against eyes, crushing stubble and twisting lips, feel so safe?
Could be toothpaste, ozone, chlorine and cool linens. Could be shower fog constricting hallways of crumbling plaster and falling sea tiles. Could be the mother’s hair rinse or the father’s sock drawer.
This thing with the soap then is, as everything seems to be, about the smell. Sandalwood and coconut, rosemary or peppermint, English lavender—good god with that plastic quart bottle of Yardley’s twenty—twenty! years removed and it’s still haunting me, the living and the sweet. Those little squares of French linden, nothing quite like linden even if she is dead now.
My mother once filled a shirt box with all variety of Body Shop’s “five for $12” and wrapped it for Christmas. A shirt box never smelled so good. Mary doesn’t mind that I cached satsuma in every drawer. She grieved with me when the Body Shop discontinued grapefruit. Her first forays into my then apartment are bound for both of us to those slim pink bars, that oily electric aroma. Clean and dilating, swollen with innocence, seeing through walls and wearing new skin. That was a hell of a nice soap.
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5 comments:
Hi Owen, welcome back to blogdom!
Steph
How wonderful! One of the hardest of senses to put into words, yet you've done it beautifully. And called up more: Chowders (I think)- a lavendar scented candy my Aunt Elizabeth used; an unnameable but clean woody scent of clothes in my father's dresser; Bahama Spice aftershave that I use as perfume--it smells like those red licorice nickels. Try BodyWorks Cucumber Melon, or my favorite, Raspberry Vanilla that smells of peaches instead.
susan @ spinning
Oh, Owen, your words go from my eyes directly into my bloodstream. How I used to love that Body Shop grapefruit soap. It's still funny (to me, anyway) that when I first moved to New York as a young slip of a girl, one of the two (!) Body Shops in NYC was around the corner from my apartment. I remember seeing a little feature on them in New York magazine, and all of those 5/$12 soaps looked like little glowing balloons. I loved the smell of all of that stuff, the soap, the pineapple cleansing cream (which still smells like the first day of my new job at a publishing house), the passion fruit cleansing gel (which I associate with the first time I slept over at the house of the man who would later break my heart, but on that night he most certainly did not), and even the ground-adzuki washing grains, which had a "unscented" fragrance about them the way that snow does, and which will forever smell of the day I moved into my first apartment in the city.
The bad news is that most of this stuff has been discontinued. The good news is that I have found a new source of beautiful scents at Lush, everything from orange blossom to Edinburgh rock to vanilla/tonka bean to benzoin resin (an odd name for a really gorgeous, moreish fragrance) to rose/carnation to toffee to lavender laced with thyme and grape. You could spend hours touching and smelling everything in there. I often have.
Lovely to see you back Owen :)
Thank you Steph and BW, and Susan--can you imagine marketing a candy called "Chowders" today? Coming to mind are hacked bits of clam frozen in amber sugar. Come to think of it I'd probably try it just for the novelty. I remember your writing about your father's shirts. I know that smell you describe, even if it is not the same.
And Jen, orange blossom--have you ever smelled one? That is one of my wishes for all the world, to stand agog in the middle of an orange orchard in bloom.
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