Seriously...

Been too long a while since I blogged it up, but the treehouse is being remodeled inside and out.

I understand that there are serious and highly important issues to choose to write about, and with just some minimal thought and attention to the morning paper, your favorite under-the-radar information service, or your own inquisitive mind one can’t help but be stirred to act upon or at least write on one of the many pertinent, sad, hilarious, horrific, passionate, significant, triumphant occurrences of today and yesterday, with the hope to put another voice out there for the readers of tomorrow. Yet… I have to say that Tide with Febreze is a fantastic detergent.

As is Persil! But you can only get Persil in Europe, or maybe just Germany. And knowing how even the pungent odor of mildew reminds me of a few of my happiest childhood memories in rural northern California, there’s something to be said for this. My clothes offered up the most pleasant smell to any room after they were bathed in Persil, the green liquid kind, offering a smell that gently permeated the air around my clothing, even (EVEN!) when my shirts were tucked away in a drawer in Toronto a few weeks later! That’s some good pungent-ness. And while I couldn’t get Persil in Toronto, I found Tide with Febreze to be the next best thing, and my clothes made the apartment, the elevator, and even the TTC subway cars reek with clean. So now that I am back in San Francisco I have a problem, and I think it’s found in the dryer. My clothes, though washed with Tide with Febreze, continually smell like a clothes dryer motor, the same scent they always had when I lived in San Francisco, using the same clothes dryer. After the heat turns cool, the Tide with Febreze has been, well, erased.

We use scent to contact our memories. I remember smelling the blanket that Dorothy laid on the first night she came over to my place in 2002 to watch a movies, and it had her lovely scented perfume on it when she left, subtle but ever-present. The next evening a good friend came to spend the night and I purposely hid that blanket from his patchouli-laden body, but even the hiding place was eventually infiltrated with this hippie oil effervescence, yet I hoarded that Dorothy-scent for as long as it could last, until it seemed to be gone, though it would definitely not be the last time I would have her over.

But now, the Tide with Febreze is another scent with an attached memory, and I have been robbed of it by the motor of an ancient clothes dryer. For to have that simple smell around me over the course of a day makes me happy, in the car, in a room, just below my nose and chin, whenever I need it. It just feels like it fades faster than it should, and the dryer is the thief.

Flavor, scent, color, harmony and texture. Thankfully, the senses shoot an unfiltered direct line to the memory when it comes to importance and significance. And thankfully, there is nothing we can do about it.