Today, at 12 in the afternoon, I stood in my drawing room, performing my post-shower gentleman’s toilette. It was then that it happened.
The hefty glass bottle containing my face cream. Innocuous. Doing the one job it’s been commissioned for. Holding my face cream.
There I am, putting face cream on my face at 12 in the afternoon on what was a very busy workday. And then it happened.
I was no longer standing in my drawing room with a packed calendar beside me. It was summer. Last year’s summer when life was innocenter, freer, and full of possibilities. It caught me off guard.
The sheer act of spreading some inconspicuous emollient on my hands and then cupping those hands and pressing them on my face was ~a time machine~ an anywhen door as real as any I’d ever been ~in~ through.
It has to do with olfactory receptors in the reptilian part of the brain. What does that matter? Carnal is visceral and visceral is real and real is all that matters.
My real, then, whispered to me soothingly, convincingly, “it is summer.”
So summer it is.