Running with Scissors

Sara Peterson-Davis has worked as a newspaper researcher and reporter, as well as a communications director and consultant. She and her husband, Monty Davis, can be found in Liberty, Mo., keeping their two children from running with scissors. Contact Sara

Something’s in the Air

Something stinks at our house, and it’s not the leftovers in the fridge.

Actually, it’s somebody. Seth, the boy whose hygiene habits up to this point were best described as “hit-or-miss,” now smells so fresh and clean it brings tears to our eyes, literally.

Every time he walks out of the house for school he leaves us behind coughing and wheezing in an overpowering cloud of men’s body spray.

And as he walks out the door, I worry. I worry that the bus driver will lose consciousness in the haze that must form when Seth sits in a confined space. I worry that the other kids on the bus won’t regain their eyesight before their first period classes.

I worry for my sanity, because every mother knows that when a boy cares about how he smells it’s because he wants a girl to notice him.

I should have known things would start to ripen up, so to speak, when we started clothes shopping for this school year. The boy who wore the same shirt day after day during his 5th grade year, suddenly had some definite wardrobe requests.

Requests that didn’t include t-shirts emblazoned with the names of sports teams or the faces of cartoon characters. I was giddy as we went from store to store filling shopping bags with clothes that actually matched.

I was so happy I completely missed the significance when Seth asked if he could buy a can of that men’s body spray. The kind featured in commercials where women attack any man who wears it. He wanted to wear shirts with collars and smell good too.

Who was I to ask questions?

I’d forgotten about how important the sense of smell is to a boy’s girl-getting plan. When my nephew and his friends were in high school, they devised an olfactory strategy that had each of them wearing distinctly different colognes. He explained that the girls they met that night would remember them by their scent.

“Are the girls you’re going after blind or just not very bright?” I asked, never recalling identifying a cute guy with my nose.

“Oh, very funny, Aunt Sara.”

Well there must be something in the air, because not long after Seth started smelling up the place the phone started ringing. Our end of the conversations sound a little something “like” this:

“Hi?”

“Who?”

“I don’t “like” her like her. I just like her.”

“Who said I like her?”

“No, really. I like her like a friend.”

O.K. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

I know it’s only a matter of time and aerosol fog before Seth finds the girl he really does “like” like. Then he’ll probably graduate to the cologne counter of our local department store in search of the perfect scent.

In the meantime, if we were really smart, the rest of us would go shopping for the perfect set of nose plugs.

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