If I could go back to the beginning right now...

I think that the first thing that I would do in my last week of my first pregnancy, would be to choose a scent for the house and laundry.

I do love, now that the scent of "Gain" reminds me of my sister Jackie. She seems to have mastered the art of pressing her mark on the souls of the children through scents. Everybody in my family knows that Gain smells like Aunt Jackie's house. Always clean and always laundry done or getting done. I admire her in that.

I'm a first child, so my home smell is the smell of baby milk. I grew up with it as my most pungent remembrance and I grew my children with that as their primary home memory. It absolutely never occurred to me that I had a choice in that matter. I grew up with baby milk and I passed that along to my children. My third sister grew up with a mother who probably had developed a sense of aroma-therapeutic methods in her growth into nursing mastery.

I would go to the store in the last weeks of pregnancy and taste the scents and choose which of them, after the Woolite smell of early baby laundry. I am going to buy some Woolite today to reminisce about my baby-child scent remembrances that are now, only a faint memory, fleeting and going into "nearly forgotten". Uh-oh, it's gone...