Blinded by the Light and Woke Up by the dooce.com in the Middle of the Night

Yes, I have seen the light. Because of dooce (peer to the right please for the URL), I have begun the arduous yet liberating and exhilarating task known 'round these parts as: Spring Cleaning.

You've heard of it? Well, the oops is on me then.

I started with our coat closet. Apparently, we like coats (and cookbooks) very much. We have coats with my old company logo on them. Coats with at least a year's worth of dirt on them. Coats that the kid grew out of 24 months ago. Coats that I outgrew--on several levels and sizes--in 1988 (which, you will soon see, is a running theme of my spring clean).

Some I kept, like my black and white Fonzarelli motocycle jacket. Finn may want to burn that some day in effigy and I couldn't, just simply could not, rob that from his future angst. A teenage soul needs light--burning, yet controllable, flames, if necessary--to live.

I don't know that I can trash any of my cookbooks. I may want to try that mackerel jelly roll someday. You never really know.

So I closed the doors on the coat closet and took on the linen closet. And it needed a showdown. I mean, really needed a showdown.

I threw out several bottles of infant cough medicine, vintage 2003. I transferred some 30-thread count linens to the costume department. (Finn will be a ghost or mummy this year, methinks.) I sandwiched several bars of Zest between towels, tablecloths, and pillowcases. (To keep the odors spring fresh.)

And then I faced my nemesis.

I don't consider myself a packrat. Or collector. But I know what I like. And back in 1988, yes, 1988, I liked Victoria's Secret Raspberry Glace. It was one of the first fruity scents trapped in a body lotion--and it was less floral and more desserty than a lot of what you find on the shelves today.

So when VS discontinued it in something like 1989, I started buying up bottles. And because I would never, never, never find a scent I would like so much, I eased my use. I hoarded. I left bottles unsqueezed, unopened, unconsumed.

And then, because I taught seventh grade, had female relatives, and was of an age and disposition to care about and smother my B.O., I started receiving other kinds of body lotions. Kiwi and apple. Green tea and lime. Cucumber and melon.

And they kept coming. Fast.

So when I began to clean out my closet, I had a healthy supply of body lotions, aged between 2 and, eegads, 20 years. Stored, neatly and in chronological order, next to my collection of '80s plum eyeshadows (the real and original purples), '70s peach lipsticks I stole from mother, and chalky early 90s reds. And those were stashed neatly next to the wired buckets of free gifts, from every era, decade, and mood of my life. Free Estee Lauder gifts. Free Lancome gifts. Free Clinique gifts. My life, scented and branded.

My really rather entire scent and color-me-beautiful history was all contained on two shelves of a linen closet. I don't have any clothes or shoes left from high school (except for the aforementioned leather and a pair of NaNas). I've never been a big photo albumer. I suppose the multiple bottles of Raspberry Glace and pill boxes of eyeshadow are the closest thing I get to a scrapbook.

So to get all that--and I mean all that--into the trash bag took a lot of sucking air and pep talks. Out loud. Out really loud.

But I'm kind of happy to say that that history is off the shelves and in a Hefty cinch sack. And when you think about, it's rather nice company--a kind of conflating of personal and family history in the mingling of cosmetic tubes and medicine bottles.

It could be said.

(A quick addendum: I did take several bottles of VS on our backpacking trip through Europe in 1992. So for me, Raspberry Glace will always be the scent of youth, blisters--and a democratized Czech Repulic.)