I remember my dad teaching me to wash my hands; he taught my sons also. He was a big believer in not making yourself sick unnecessarily, and since he grew up before antibiotics, he wasn’t lackadaisical about it. I also brushed my teeth a lot too, but that is a different story in the same vein.

Anyway, I have always associated the aroma of soap with being protected, or watched over, or however you want to put it. Now I will get my hands filthy dirty right along with the best of them – including lying under my old MB300D fiddling with leaking lines and hoses. (May it rest in peace) However, when I go to get them clean, I want something that smells robust  . . . that takes five fingers and stamps C-L-E-A-N on them – and, yeah, the other hand too.

I do not use lavender scented soap by choice. And when it comes to scents like apple and strawberry . . . well, they’ll do in a pinch. Of course, you don’t get the psychic comfort out of the scent, but nothing’s perfect.

Two days ago I was in Wal-Mart to get softsoap refills and I saw there were some melon-scented bottles for 97¢. I figured at the rate we go through soap, I’d get a couple of bottles. Now I feel as if I have namby-pamby hands – the kind of hands that hang back when the slop jar spills.

Okay, we don’t have slop jars in my house now – but we have dogs and every now and then it gets a bit sloppy.

So I head for the serious stuff. Ironically, I don’t like the hand sanitizers. They smell like I’m going to have some medical procedure done; they don’t make me feel old-fashioned clean. My hair and the rest of my body can smell like apples or pomegranates, but darn it, I want my hands to radiate SOAP. It’s a quirk, I guess.