contest! win a year of barely native organic soaps
Our new contest is compliments of our friends at Barely Native, purveyors of soap products made with organic herbs and essential oils to leave skin feeling clean and moisturized. Barely Native is generously offering one lucky reader an entire YEAR of their non-toxic, cruelty-free soaps with a free membership in the Soap of the Month Club — a $100 value. We kind of wish we could enter this one!
Here’s how to enter for your chance to win: Tell us what scent evokes a pleasant memory for you, and tell us about that memory, in a comment on this post. Leave your comment between now and Tuesday, May 12, 5 p.m. EST. When comments close, the Shelterrific team will read them all and choose the one we think is the winner. That’s right — no random number generator this time. Instead, we’ll be selecting a winner based on our favorite comment! So think before you post! Be sure to leave a working email address. We can’t wait to read your comments!
Thanks so much to Brian and his team at Barely Native for making this giveaway possible.
P.S. We’ll announce the winners of the previous Small Garden Contest next week.
One of my favorite smells has to be printed matte paper. No matter where I am, if I find some I just have to smell it. It just reminds me of old books as a kid. I even got Demeter’s Papeback perfume because it smells like that paper: )
The smell of lilacs transports me through time whenever I catch the slightest wiff of it.
When I was growing up we lived next door to an old lady named Rosie. Rosie’s husband had passed long before we moved into the neighborhood and her only daughter lived hours away. Rosie sort of adopted my sister and I, and our family adopted her back. She rarely left her house, and never ventured out of her yard.
Planted along the hedges between our two yards were 3 gorgeous lilac trees. Rosie had planted them, two light purple and one dark, when she and her husband had first bought the house. The trees hung over our driveway and I could smell them from my bedroom every spring.
Rosie was happy to allow my sister and I to cut bunches of fresh lilacs from her trees. The bouquets ended up as Mother’s Day gifts for my mom, were plunked into mason jars to decorate our kitchen table and were wrapped in wet paper towels and brought to school for favorite teachers.
Rosie has long since passed, but whenever I smell lilac I remember her generosity to two little girls who she came to think of as family.
One scent forever emblazoned in my memory is that of my mother’s skin in summertime. When I was a very little girl, my mother would join me in the water at our local beach, and together we would swim, bob up and down, and float. Mom always taught me the importance of respecting the water and not fighting it if I panicked. Floating, treading–these things seemed to me like special talents to which only I was privvy.
When I did tire after a while, Mom would scoop me up in her arms and wade chest-deep in the salty Long Island Sound. The water might have been chilly, but her skin was always warm and smelled comforting, like the scent of warm sunlight pouring through a window screen or the familiar musky sweetness of my own pillow. It was, perhaps, the only scent more familiar to me than my own. Mom laughed, and bobbed, danced and glided through the water. Smiling at each other and laughing together, our eyes stinging from salt water, I never felt more loved, safe, and secure.
Nowadays, the only time I come across that scent is when I’m in the ocean with my two little boys. For a brief moment, I forget myself. And then I realize it’s me who now evokes the scent of childhood’s unconditional, loving, endless summer.
[...] many great scents, so many amazing memories, but the Shelterrific team agrees: this comment by Krista really got to us. It’s not only a [...]