The Bee's Knees

So I'm lotioning my hands with Burt's Bees Milk & Honey Body Lotion this afternoon in an effort to preserve some youthfulness in them after all the bleach I've had to use in recent days trying to get rid of viruses lurking around our house...

...and I'm immediately transported to the....beach!!

I know. I know. What do bees and cows have to do with the seaside? The lotion has a faintly coconutty sort of smell...like that of suntan lotion. It's the smell of summertime, sandcastles, ocean waves, and sunshine.

I find it funny how a smell can transport me to somewhere else. I actually found myself smiling as I greased my hands, thinking about warm memories of the kids playing at the beach.

I've always been like that, though.

I can smell a bag of salt-n-vinegar potato chips and fly back to England to 1988 to the Eve of Christmas Eve's picnic in Lydiard Park, with peanut-butter-and jam sandwiches and milk and, what else, salt-n-vinegar "crisps."

Or walk into a school and smell the cleaning sprays mixed with cafeteria lunch and go back to 1978 to Theodore Judah Elementary School in Folsom, California, where I spent 3rd and 4th grade learning Spanish in a new "land" across the nation from my birthplace.

Or smell cherry blossoms, sending me back to the mid-'80s when we lived near a wildlife reserve that had an open meadow with cherry trees in it. I'd hike down the wooded hill behind our house, across the little creek at the bottom of the hill, and up the other side to emerge from the trees into this little paradise of a meadow. It seemed like a world of its own. I'd take my writing book and sit for a few hours on a warm Spring afternoon, writing, drawing, and dreaming.

Smells and memories...always the "bee's knees" in my book.

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And, on another note, funny how you can find a photo of nearly anything you want on the Internet. I'll bet I'd have found a video on YouTube of someone using this lotion...