I opened the door and was greeted by deafening silence. Heavenly, rare, deafening silence.
It was one of those rare occasions where the hubs and I were ships passing in the night. I was returning home late from a business meeting, he had left in the early afternoon for a boys’ fishing trip. We had bartered and begged and delegated the children to different friends and family scattered throughout the town in order to cover the 6 hours in which neither of us would be in town. And so what I came home to after a long delayed flight and subsequent 2 hour drive from the airport was sweet sweet silence and an empty house.
I took my time unloading my suitcase from the car as there was no one home to need anything (nay demand anything) from me immediately. I schlepped my suitcase into the bedroom and made my way to the half bath after drinking one too many Big Gulps on the way home.
When I entered the bathroom I was greeted by a sweet citrus smell. The entire bathroom seemed to have been scrubbed just before my arrival. I looked around astonished that my husband would think to clean the house just before my arrival (God knows how much I hate returning to a messy house) and that’s when I saw it.
One of the children’s cereal bowls sitting on the shelf with what seemed to be an old bar of soap sitting in it. I didn’t remember buying grapefruit scented soap but it could’ve been from years ago. They have a tendency to dig up things long forgotten and put them on display for me.
It looked just like a bar of soap looks years after its prime. You know when it’s all dried up and misshapen? But it smelled delicious.
I picked it up and held it to my nose breathing the scent in. The smell of fresh grapefruit in a perfectly silent house is just short of heaven I believe.
The thing was I just couldn’t quite place when I had bought fancy soap and just exactly where they had found it. Throughout the night I returned several times to inhale it’s tropical scent. In between making dinner and washing my face. I never bothered to wash my hands after fondling it because it was, after all, just soap.
The next morning the spell had been broken as I left to collect all the children and return to my life of chaos and macaroni and cheese- leaving my grapefruit scented silence as a memory. It wasn’t long after we returned when Eeny emerged from the guest bathroom pressing the bar to her lips and breathing deeply saying “This is my favorite. I love the way this smells.”
“I know!” I wholeheartedly agreed. “What IS that? Where did you guys get that?” I asked.
“Meeny found it in the boys bathroom at Tae Kwon Do and brought it home,” she happily replied.
