Cheese

When I was a freshman in college, my parents sent me a quarter wheel of stilton cheese in the mail. This has got to win the prize for most unusual and unfortunate care package to send your kid during their first week of college. And I'm sure it was sent with only the best wishes for starting off the year on the right foot, but oh my god. It's a miracle I made any friends that year, let alone married the boy living across the hall seven years later. Actually now that I think of it, he probably needed those seven years just to clear the air.

Let me take a step back and say that my parents didn't go out to the store and select a partial wheel of blue cheese with me in mind. It was leftover from a party they threw. Although I'm not sure that makes it any better. If they had instead sent leftover plastic forks, my life would have been so different. Because it's not just what that boulder of cheese did to our room, it's what it did to the entire dorm hall.

The mini-fridge I shared with my roommates stunk to high heaven while closed. When you opened the door? The door would only need to be opened a slight fraction of an inch for the odor to fill our room, travel under and around the sides of the shut door to our room, and envelop the hallway with the suffocating stench of ripe Stilton. I was the definition of a bad roommate.

Don't get me wrong - I love cheese! Stilton even. The stinkier the better in my opinion. But you have to be in the mood for this sort of thing, prepared for the onslaught. One of the most ill-prepared I ever was for the stifling scent of cheese was when I was in the first trimester of my second pregnancy. I was walking down the town's main drag and suddenly succumbed to an extremely powerful 1-2 punch in the olfactory department. Look at this line up:

The first part was walking past The Body Shop, but about 7 stores before you reach the Body Shop, you can already smell their latest fruity product from the candle they're burning out on the sidewalk. Sometimes it's Japanese Cherry Blossom or Moroccan Rose, but other times the White Musk White Hot Summer Smooth Satin Body Lotion inside completely overpowers the little candle outside. It's that smelly. Even their Black Velvet Apricot Candle - which sounds kind of glum and low-key but you would be surprised to find both your eyebrows singed off from the sheer stink of it.

Then, just one store past the Body Shop, when you are still within the bubble of fruity doom, you are forced to walk right in front of the Cheese Shop. And it is here that the White Musk White Hot Summer Smooth Satin Body Lotion is abruptly replaced by this:

I mean, even a non-pregnant person sometimes has a hard time distinguishing between an expensive, soft French cheese and their own dirty laundry. So you can imagine that when this complex, blasting aroma hits right on the heels of Passionflora Fruitstick Body Butter, I nearly went into preterm labor right then and there. Of course, the ironic part is that just a few months later I would have happily devoured the entire contents of that store.