Scents and sensibility and soap

My husband and I agree completely on keeping a well-stocked pantry. (He calls it "survival prep." I roll my eyes, and call it a well stocked pantry, but it comes to much the same thing.) He believes in well-stocked stores of ammo, to the point I shake my head, smile, and let it go. Similarly, he shakes his head, smiles, and lets go just how many bars of soap I accumulate.

Yes, I have a large store of handmade soap. It's handy stuff, soap, stores well, and you're going to use it all up eventually. (Not unlike ammo, really.) But it accumulates almost accidentally. You see, my skin and lungs don't agree with a lot of stuff off the shelf, so I buy from small batch soapmakers - as the people who make it on a "Sell at the farmer's market / RenFaire / coffee shop" level use their own product, and are invested in making something that's gentle and beautiful.

Peter has long ago learned that I walk a zig-zag path among stalls - to the other side of the path and quickly avoiding the reek of incense that emanates from one tent, steering wide of the scented candles at another... and when I find I'm passing a soap-maker's booth that doesn't make my sinuses hate me, I go "Oooh!" and hook a quick turn in, hand on wallet.

This means I come back from vacation with a handful of bars of soap, instead of the usual tourist trinkets... and when I've used up a bar, I can pull out the stockpile and sort by scent, whim, and memory, like pulling out vacation photos. Here's the bar from the tiny town's founder's fest in rural Tennessee, here's a bar from vacation with friends in Colorado. (That one's really good for dry skin.) This one comes from the middle of a very long road trip, when we stopped at a tiny town in Texas far off the main highways, and found they had a wonderful cafe with awesome mochas sharing space with a Christian bookstore, in a building that had been standing (and falling down) since the early-1800's...

I just unwrapped a bar of lemongrass for the shower from the Davidson County Fair in Tennessee, where we also got stone-ground cornmeal from a watermill that'd been moved to the fairgrounds. (There was a generator powering the pump that moved water from the pond below the water wheel back up to the mill race. Awesome, ingenious, and gloriously good cornmeal.) And Peter learned what demolition derbies were, even if he wasn't sure why his wife was whooping and hollering along with the rest of the crowd. He also learned a lot more about chicken breeds, and why I believe revenge is best served as steaming hot soup, with a side of garlic bread.

Good times. Good soap, too.