none of your beeswax

i was just going to call this post what it is (which is an ode to chapstick), but i got worried about copyright infringement.  and, also, i don't really want this blog popping up in someone's google-search for the product.  not really.  even if it is search result 5,318,029 of 5,940,000 gathered within 0.29 seconds.  well, maybe i do kind of think that would be okay.  just a little bit.

sometimes, one of my posts comes out of a wandering mind trying to find a pattern.  really, that's probably what all of them are:  finding and following the smoke trail that will make sense of things.  put everything in its place so that i can go back to ignoring it for a time.

today,

it was chapstick.

still life with chapstick

i have chapsticks everywhere.  i prefer to think of it as a preference than an addiction.  it didn't use to be this way.  i think i remember a time when i didn't crave...i mean occasionally apply...much of anything on my lips.  oh, the odd evening of lipstick-wearing or the youthful purchase of bubble-gum flavored lip gloss.  the kind that was like rolling a thick oil slick across your lips.  but chapstick?  really, it's kind of foggy how it all started.

sometimes i can't find it right away and i start to panic.

i started carrying a spare in my satchel because i would, every now and then, leave my chapstick in a pocket and be stranded at work with only my back-up tube of a brand-that-will-remain-nameless and shamed for its reliable tendency to dry my lips out even more regardless of its lofty price tag.  not so the chapstick.  whose application to my lips is infrequent.  unless i am stressed.  or nervous.  or deep in thought.  or stalling for time.  or just plain need some chapstick.

cherry just because i'm bold like that.

i am a plain jane when it comes to chapstick.  i like it straight up, no frills, just the old reliable.  it does the job, and i've been burned by flavored lips in the past.  all those candy- or fruit-scented off-brands just suck the moisture right out of my pucker.

but, then, there was lone pine.  i was running on empty with the chapstick, and we were about halfway through a two-week road trip.  i knew i had to find some, whatever the cost.  and there it was, at the check-out counter of the little main street grocery store in lone pine, california.  but it was pink, not the usual black-and-white tube of my dreams.  well, it was california, and i was feeling bold.  what's wrong with a little pink chapstick?  until i cracked it open (yep, a deep luxurious pink), slid it across my lower lip, and inhaled.  cherries.  and not real cherries.  the scent the scent people have decided will be cherries.  it is a toss-up for me between whether i dislike "grape" flavored things or "cherry" flavored things the most.  (flavor and scent being, as you know, rather interchangeable.)

but there i was, with my cherry chapstick that had, now, become emblematic of a fantastic family road trip.  that was it.  all the goodness of a great vacation packaged in a small pink tube of wax (or, more precisely, of camphor, beeswax, menthol, petrolatum, phenol, vitamin e, aloe, and/or oxybenzone).  i loved that tube of cherry chapstick.  when it, finally, had been used up all the way down to the little white center stick, i resorted to scraping dollops of it out with the nail of my pinky finger - the top of the nail, and then i would deposit it on my lower lip and, in an age-old technique, my lips (through the miracle of more than half a dozen muscles) smash|smear it around until that cherry goodness was evenly distributed between the two.

the insidiousness of routine

hi.

my name is me,

and i

love

~

chapstick.