Like a lot of people with office jobs, I spend about ten or so hours a day sitting in front of a computer, maybe more. Then I switch to a sofa and spend the rest of my waking hours in front of a television screen, my phone, or both. That’s a lot of time on the ol’ tush and because of my poor gene pool, I was blessed with two legs that connect directly to a back and no padding whatsoever in between. Leg, to crack, to back. I can’t even wear pants without a belt because there is nothing there to hold them up.
In order to give my poor tailbone a break, I try to take a walk around my neighborhood a few times a day. There are many smells in my neighborhood. It may sound weird but it adds another layer to the brief adventure. I smell the leaves in the fall. The flowers in spring. Food. My neighborhood is fairly diverse so if I happen to take a walk around at mealtime it is like a brief trip around the world. Roasted meat here. A whiff of garlic there. Exotic spices. It’s quite remarkable.
Of all the smells, the one that brings me the most comfort, the most nostalgia, is the smell of laundry floating out of someone’s vent. Lavender mist. Sunshine clouds. Spring rain. I love to catch a little whiff and think of burying my face in some warm towels fresh out of the dryer. I instantly imagine cuddling up in a soft fleece blanket with sparkles floating around me like I’m in some cheesy commercial. I used to at least.
Every now and then my wife will join me on these walks. When she comes I pick up the pace a little bit so that she doesn’t realize how out of shape and decrepit I am. Our neighborhood is rather hilly and one time as I was huffing and puffing up an incline a gentle breeze of sunrise meadows or autumn orchards caught my nose. As I breathed in I must have made a sound of ecstasy. My wife looks at me and says, “Gross!”
That word comes out of her mouth directed at me at least a hundred times a day so I had to ask for clarification on what exactly it was that was gross. She replied, “The smell. That nasty laundry smell. It’s so gross!”.
I found this rather surprising. The smell was not overpowering. It was subtle. Way more subtle than some of the candles we have that are not referred to as “Gross!”. I pressed her to explain to me why she found this smell so particularly repulsive. Ignorance is bliss...
She began to explain to me that the smell was the steam coming off of laundry. I already knew that. I still didn’t understand. The clothes were clean so why was that, that big of a deal? Now, at our house, we do not use scented laundry soap, dryer sheets, any of that fun stuff because we’re all allergic to them. Then she continued on about how many times she has to wash my shirts to get them to not smell at all, which means that in most cases that smell is just masking the grossness that still lurks in the fibers.
At first I dismissed this as nonsense. My shirts didn’t stink after they were washed. That couldn’t be possible. We have a state of the art washing machine. Then she proved it to me. She made me smell a workout shirt that had just been washed. It didn’t smell bad...but it did smell like my deodorant. “You think “so and so” over there washes his shirts 3 times before he puts them in the dryer? Or how about “so and so” after they’re done working all day? You think they put it through more than once?...” She was right. I know “so and so” and “so and so” and I wouldn’t trust those guys to put their clothes in the wash with soap. I wouldn’t trust those guys to put it in there at all.
All of my fantasies of burying my head in fresh laundry evaporated with the now gross smell of “autumn orchards” that encircled my nose. I might as well have had my neighbors gross ogre toes stuck right up my nose hole. Now when I walk about my neighborhood and catch a luxurious whiff I am instantly repulsed. And, I’ll be honest, I don’t know if this pain in my rear is actually from sitting all day or something else.