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A nose by any other name...

I know it's been proven that certain smells are linked strongly with memory. I am not sure why this is the case - maybe biologically we are hard wired to associate smells with certain kinds of dangers or events so that we can recognize them in the future. Whatever the case, I'm having a pleasant memory at the moment: I'm doing laundry.

I've stayed home from church in the hopes of not infecting others with whatever weird ailment I've got. I could hardly sleep last night because every time I rolled overs would get extremely dizzy. Weird, that. Being woken up because you're dizzy is extremely disconcerting.

But, as I'm at home, I decidedto take care of the laundry. I am not sure how the specific combination of dryer sheets and laundry detergent is working just right this morning, but I'm taken back to when I was growing up. We were expected to do our own laundry, which meant that out laundry room was always a bit of a mess. My sweet mother, for all of her angelic and redeeming qualities, was never the best at being tidy, and so things were always quite chaotic. I say this with absolute love in my heart. She was always more concerned about how well we were loved than how her home looked.

And I love her for that.

I remember one morning not having any clean pants to wear. I was up early - had to be up early for stage band at Lakeridge, anyway, where I was last chair in the trumpet section. So I put my pants in the wash while I had a shower and then threw them in the dryer while I had breakfast. The upshot was that my failure to plan ahead caused me to have to walk to school on a very wintery morning wearing pretty damp jeans. The bottom portion of them was frozen by the time I got to school. It makes me smile, now, but it was pretty miserable then.

Maybe this kind of association is why I like doing the laundry - the feel of the warm clothes fresh out of the dryer, the sounds of uneven loads thumping in the washer, the sight of neatly stacked, folded, clean clothes ready for wear, and above all, the smell of clean laundry and the laundry room...

Or maybe I'm just a bit of a freak. ;)

Comments

lillysmum said…
I'm going with freak. I hate doing laundry, which is why I go a month without doing it and then have 7 loads to do at once.
Hope you feel better soon.
October 12, 2014 at 6:17 PM
Bill Cobabe said…
Thank you. Should be right as rain soonest.
October 12, 2014 at 8:04 PM
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