Smelly Cat
I love the idea of having optimism in a bottle, which is probably why I bought some Optimism in a bottle from Bath & Body. I also bought some Headache Relief and some Flu-Begone (not the real name, but who knows what the real name is? I certainly can't remember) because you can never have too many bottles full of things that smell like mint and eucalyptus.
True story: My father once spent a night sleeping in his truck, in our driveway because he got so angry at my mother for boiling eucalyptus in the house. He chain smoked in the house, and she had constant sinus headaches from it. The eucalyptus helped her head. It was a war of smells in our home. Dad's cigarettes, Mom's eucalyptus, and my perfume du jour. It was the 80s, so you can count on me having had Poison, Obsession, or Giorgio of Beverly Hills fumes following me wherever I went.
But I digress. Headache Relief does not really work, but I find it enjoyable. Optimism really doesn't work. Some days I sit here at my desk, huddled over the roller ball like a squirrel over a nut, sniffing and snorting, hoping that some genie of wonder will fly up my nose. So far all I've gotten is a headache (not cured by Headache Relief, see above) and a wet nose. Well, maybe a little bit more.
Optimism smells like my Granny's bathroom, which smelled like the soap section of an Avon catalog. I loved my Granny's bathroom.
Granny lived in a tiny, two bedroom house, built on a square. If you walked in the front door (which she always said was the back door), you entered the living room, which shared a wall with the master bedroom. From the living room or master bedroom, you entered a tiny hallway that connected my dad's old bedroom to the dining room, on opposite ends of the house. From Dad's bedroom or the dining room, you entered the kitchen/laundry room, which was a long, narrow corridor of appliances, and the back door (or the front door, if you were Granny) of the house.
In the heart of that square was the bathroom. The only door into the tiny bath faced the living room, so if the living room door was open, and the front door was open, you'd better hope you'd remembered to shut the bathroom door, or the Pass family could see everything you were doing.
I cannot tell you how many happy days I spent running in circles, starting in the bathroom, tearing through the dining room, down the kitchen, around into Dad's bedroom, back through to the hallway with the bathroom. (Granny also had a small vanity sitting in the hallway there. I had a nightmare when I was about four, that my mother's severed head was on a platter on the vanity shelf. The head would talk to me. It was horrifying enough that I remember it.) Granny's bathroom was nifty because it had soap shaped like things.
She had shell shaped soaps, boat shaped soaps, rose shaped soaps, all from Avon, and all smelling like delicious things. Granddaddy also had a barber's cup with a shaving soap and shaving brush. I used it to clean rocks one day. I was much older before I understood why that upset him so much. He smelled like Old Spice.
Okay, so maybe this bottle doesn't give me Optimism, but it does give me soft, wonderful memories of that hothouse home in Alabama. I can remember how Granny's thin, cotton shirts would stick to the perspiration on her back when I would hug her, and the little beads of sweat that dotted her upper lip while she worked over the black stove in her kitchen. Until the late 80s, when my father installed central air and heat for them, the only summertime relief came from a little window unit in Dad's old bedroom and box fans placed in strategic doorways.
I miss Granny. She was the fashionista in my family, and the one who taught me that if you couldn't afford to buy what you wanted, you should get a job at the store selling your dreams and purchase them at a discount. That's what she did, and that's how she furnished her house and her wardrobe with nice things from J.C. Penney. That and layaway. We're high faluting, us Morrises. (I got a job at Express and later at Ross. Our tastes were a bit different.)
Enough sniffing. I need to get back to work.
bathing suit and feeling good about it. I wore a bathing suit when I was straining the seams of a size 18 and felt good about it, too. When I am in a size 10 (which is the lowest of my weight/size goals) I will feel good about it. Because it has nothing to do with what anyone else thinks of the way I look, or how tall and thin Bar Rafaeli is, or how coltish and stunning that one model's legs I just saw were. It has to do with what I think about ME.
