You have to try this.
Clearing out under the sink (no I haven't had a sudden attack of domestication, I mean under duress, during the recent (recent?) and still ongoing works at this house in which we received not one but two new kitchens with another to come, plus four complete changes of counter top...)
To begin again.....
Clearing out under the sink, I found a great many pairs of rubber gloves, all used once, rinsed, and chucked in there for later. Obviously for many of them, later never came. Eventually they begin to perish and become tacky.
Still,...
.....my point...
Christmas! When you were a kid, back in the days of single glazing; do you remember the week of Christmas? The warm, golden, even superheated few days when nobody seemed to go outdoors at all, when grown-ups wanted to include you in board games and you couldn't tell the pouring rain outside from the condensation on the windows, except by hiding behind the curtains and drawing smileys? That brief and heavenly period when the decorations were holding up and there was still a bowl of walnuts or satsumas to be found, to hold on your lap through The Wizard Of Oz or whatever Christmas movies they stuck on TV?
When absolutely everything was right with the world? When the bottom of the Quality Street or Roses tin still held three or four different types of chocolate in their tantalising brightly coloured wrappers, not just all the toffee pennies that granny couldn't get her teeth round any more?
No?
Your loss. I can - at least I couldn't and wouldn't have tried, until I smelled a single, decaying rubber glove.
Now I can't stop sniffing it. It says: 'My mum's old front room, the wet Wednesday after Christmas, when the paraffin heater has been on the go all day and the compulsory balloons on the wall (twenty or more, in groups of at least three - start with the corners and the window) are beginning to droop.'
I never knew that magical moment smelled like perishing balloons, but I do now.
I think I'm going to like autumn more than usual, this year.
6 comments:
Oh dear. Here I thought I was the only one with a collection of decaying rubber gloves. I also thought Christmas smelled like cigarette smoke and whiskey breath with undertones of roast beef. It was always too warm in the house, with the thermostat permanently jacked up to 74f even with all those extra bodies.
Grandma had the softest hands and ten perfectly manicured nails, so one might assume rubber gloves were lurking somewhere under her kitchen sink. Either that, or Grandpa really did all of the cleaning ...
Smells are so evocative and bring back so many memories, especially of childhood!
I suspect rubber gloves may enjoy fates not entirely dissimilar to socks...
Smells throw me back into worlds past.
I've love the smell of a musty basement, the smell of pipe tobacco, and even cigarette smoke and coffee. They all throw me back.
I always suspected that you had a smell thing going on too.
Perhaps you're odd :) but I wouldn't use this as sole proof positive. Smells bring out the memories--good and bad for most people I'd guess. I know that I can't stand the smell of wintergreen because I associate it with some nasty dental work I had done as a teenager.
My mom never used rubber gloves, so that's not a memory for me. And I'm lucky enough to have a spouse who does the dishes!
Gads, a man who does dishes?
Where'd ya find him?
I knew I should have hung around the library more, damn it. Oh, uh, not that I want a spouse, just got to clear that up.
good lord, the same nutcase visited me...
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