Perfume

I decided that what I wanted for my birthday was perfume. I've never had real perfume. I'm fairly casual most of the time, and when I do want to dress up, I'll maybe use a spritz or two of some light, fruity, body spray from Bath and Body Works. I thought it might be nice, however, to have another option-something more grown-up, elegant, and long lasting. It was fun to go perfume shopping with B. We wandered around the cosmetic counters, sniffing different fragrances and spraying the ones we liked on sample cards. B was so methodical about the whole thing that I found it funny, but he was also very helpful. Buying something like perfume was a bit overwhelming because there are so many choices, they can seem so similar, and perfumes smell very different on a person than they do on a card. B spread out the cards we’d collected, made me close my eyes, and held up each card in turn for me to smell. He’d say, “Do you like #1, or #2?” like an optometrist. It made me laugh. Still, it was a simple way to eliminate scents I didn’t like, and select those I did like. By the time I was slightly dizzy from sniffing so much, we had a reasonable number of fragrances to try. We sprayed them on different parts of my arms, then I decided which one I liked best, and we bought it. The most amusing part was walking around for the rest of the evening with six different scents wafting from me. I’m sure I must have given several people olfactory overload, especially when they encountered me in the close quarters of the shelves at Waldenbooks. I could hardly tolerate myself, so who knows what others thought! I washed my arms off with soap in a restroom, but I was still pretty pungent. Luckily the scents wore off before I went to church today.