While they are not homemade, most of these soaps are pretty nice, and since they are small, you can change fragrances or colors at whim.
Albert’s most recent acquisition was a few bars of Neutrogena glycerin soap, a brand I hadn’t seen for a while and certainly hadn’t purchased in at least 30 years. Before I stepped into the shower yesterday, I carefully unwrapped one of the bars. I was transported to my teens, when Neutrogena was all I wanted to use. The bar with its slight tackiness and amber translucence. The smell so precisely the same that it was, for an instant, the summer of 1974 in my red and white “Love” bathroom, the window is open, the radio is playing, and I’m 13 years old again.
They say that our sense of smell is our oldest sense, and the one for which we make the strongest and most lasting memories. When I think back to my childhood, I can remember vividly smells like, and I know this sounds like a cliché, the aroma of my great-aunt Aunty’s sugar cookies, and my great-uncle Joe’s scent of wood shavings combined with motor oil, good loamy earth and something akin to “man.” There are scent memories of cooking hotdogs over a driftwood fire at the beach, and exploring the Manzanita scrub below our house.
What is so fascinating about scent memories is the complexity of them. They not only conjure up the sense of the smell, but also the emotion attached to that smell, the temperature of the air on your skin, the quality of the light, the ambient sounds. They are not the “oh, remember when…” kind of memory, but more of a wham-up-the-side-of-the-head experience. I can taste Aunty’s cookies, feel the warmth of Uncle Joe’s chest, hear the roar of the ocean waves, and see the dust motes floating in the shady canopy. And they can trigger either by catching that scent anew or by bringing something to mind.
I don’t experience any other sensate memories in that way.
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