The Smell of Things To Come

This is lilac. It's important later.

Lately, I've been bothered by my nose. It's doing a really good job. Too good one might say. Here are three scenarios of my overactive nasal qualities:

Scenario 1 - I get up really early. I may have mentioned that a few times. I am never happy about it. So, on Tuesday, I got up, got dressed and began my day with as little grumbling as possible. A half an hour later, just as I was preparing to walk out the door, Maren peed on my jeans. She didn't mean to. She gets up early too and sometimes the need to pee sneaks up on her sleep-addled brain. I was helping her pull her pants down and we didn't make it. I ran in my bedroom and changed my pants and socks and then ran in her bedroom and grabbed a new pair of panties and pj pants for her and we were off. Just a wee bit late (pun sort of intended).

So, yesterday, when I got up and began half-heartedly fumbling around in the dark, I found the pants with the pee on them draped over the edge of the hamper but I couldn't remember why they were there. And since I knew I hadn't worn my favorite jeans since the last time they were washed, I threw them on. When I got to work, I realized that my ankle smelled faintly of urine.

And okay, I was embarrassed and all, but it was my ankle, which spends most of the day under my desk, so I chose to ignore it. And I would forget for ten, twenty or thirty minutes. Then the smell would drift ever so slightly upwards and I would freak out, trying to figure out what smelled like pee. Again.

Scenario 2 - About two weeks ago, I took a pan off the burner and accidentally laid a plastic bag down on it. I caught it quickly and so I had a nice melted bag, and smears of melted plastic on my burner, but no fire and no serious danger to the candies inside. And that's really what we care about, right? Anyway, I've done this before. I imagine (please don't correct me if I'm wrong) that everyone does this from time to time. My method of dealing with it is not dealing with it. I use that burner pretty much every time I need a burner for a couple of days and yes, the house always smells like burning plastic, but then it goes away and it doesn't anymore.

Except this time, I still smell the burning plastic and it's been waaayy too long for that. The whole house, from the moment I walk in smells like burning plastic. I know, in my mind, that it can't possibly. The windows are open, have been open for most of that two weeks and the plastic is all gone off the burner. But I still smell it. And I still panic, because who doesn't panic when they smell burning plastic?

This is laveder. If I were a vampire,
I'd always smell like lavender. Don't ask.

Scenario 3 - My mom and I have this thing about lilac scented stuff. You see, there isn't much. Now, you may be thinking that there really is, and you'd be thinking of lavender. And lavender's all right. It's not bad. It's just a little much for my tastes. A little heady. It's nice at bedtime, you know? But, lilac stuff. It's a little few and far between. And expensive. It tends to be expensive.

So, I walk into the bathroom today and there is a new little bottle of soap on the counter and it says Lilac in this pretty scripty font and it's already halfway empty. Which can either mean that someone bought it for home and didn't like it, so they brought it to work, or that it smells so fabulous that it's half gone in a single day. In either case, I want in on this action.


Until I squirt it on my hands and as I'm rubbing it in, I realize. It's lavender. I look at the bottle. It still says Lilac. I did not hallucinate the word Lilac. But trust me, my hands do not smell like sweetness and light and springtime. They smell like heavy sleep on starched white sheets. And there's nothing wrong with that except that my head is telling my nose that it's wrong and my nose is saying. "Whatevs. You don't know shizzle." (My nose thinks it's terrible grammar and bad use of slang make it seem ironic. It is a delusional nose.)

So then, I came back to my desk and used some Carried Away lotion from Bath and Body Works which smells like little girls and ribbons, but hey, it was free. And I can still only smell lavender and my head hurts because I shouldn't smell lavender at all.

It occurs to me after all this typing that it's not really my nose's fault here. Just my head's. My head is crazy lately, apparently. Disregard everything. Maybe my nose is ironic.