Remembrance of smells past.
6:45 p.m.
MB, the girl, and I had a lively conversation that centered around vomit. I’m not quite sure how we got on the topic, but it meant I got to regale her with stories about my two delightful offspring and various upchucking incidents. For instance, there was the time we had been to my in-laws’ for some family gathering or other, a birthday party no doubt, and Little Princess (it’s always about Little Princess) had eaten cake to excess, including one flavoured with some kind of booze, which proved to be a very grave mistake. The children, who were much younger than they are now, were asleep together in my old bedroom, in my old bed, and Hubby and I were upstairs in what used to be my brothers’s joint room, conceived of originally as the living/sleeping chamber of a rental flat when my parents first built the house.
In the middle of the night, Little Princess woke us up to say she had been sick, so I traipsed downstairs, trying all the while not to wake my parents who also slept downstairs, and discovered that she had not only been sick, but had puked in the bed, on the pillow, and on her little brother who was still sleeping blissfully even though he had an earful (literally) of semi-digested birthday cake. I had to wake him in order to change the bed and clean him up and told him, “Buddy Boy, Little Princess puked in your ear.” He was so upset, he answered, “Why did she do that? What did I ever do to her?”
MB also mentioned something about the smell of their car in the hot summer, which of course reminded me of another story, this time an episode I shall never forget that happened during our travels as a family in France. My son was 5, my daughter 8.
We had been staying in the Dordogne region for three days, exploring caves and enjoying the hospitality of a chambre d’hôte run by a German trio. The morning we left, direction St. Émilion, we stopped at the nearby town in order to get money from the bank machine and to buy the children some treats. Buddy Boy got a cowboy set, complete with spurs, pistols and holsters and a star. I don’t remember what we got Little Princess, but they both had unnaturally coloured popsicles. Not 20 minutes down the road, Little Princess lost hers, plus her breakfast, all over the back seat of our rental car. It was hot summer, we had no air conditioning, and all we had to clean up the mess was a single roll of toilet paper.
We stopped by the side of the road and I proceeded to take deep breaths of fresh air before plunging into the back seat and wiping up as much of the ick as I could. When it was as clean as I could make it with the tools at hand, we got back into the vehicle, with windows wide open, and drove to our next B&B. As soon as we arrived, I requested a bucket of soapy water and a sponge from our hostess and did the best I could to render the car habitable. Unfortunately, the smell never did leave the upholstery, and we still had a couple of weeks left to go.
Anyway, that was quite a while ago, 12 years ago in fact. But some things don’t ever go away... like certain smells in upholstery, or certain smelly memories.
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