If Military Life Had a Scent…
Hello and welcome to the Military Spouse Skin Scent Emporium! We are so pleased you’ve chosen our fine establishment for your personalized military life perfume needs. Please choose three of the following scents to combine in order to make your new perfume, which you can proudly wear throughout your brand new journey as a military spouse.
Mystical Mow: A blend of fresh cut grass and sweat, this scent is inspired by the many solo hours you will spend tending to your lawn while your loved one is unavailable to help while deployed, away for TDY, or other blissful events, which only place more life-upkeep weight on your strong-as-an-ox milspouse shoulders.
Earthy Elements: Derived from your service member’s uniform after a weekend in the field, this scent is intended to remind you of the incredible moments when they finally return home with mud-caked boots to track through the house and clothing that smells as though it might need to be boiled before use again.
PT Pleasures: Reported by thousands of milspouses worldwide as the one to perk you up. There’s no need for an automatic coffee maker when you can wake daily to the joyous smells of masculinity, sweat, and for the sake of decency, let’s hope a deodorant brand with the power of Thor and Wonder Woman’s fictional offspring.
Roses and Puppies: A divine fragrance of adorable puppy breath with floral undertones, this is a smell for the new, the young, the dreamers, and to be bluntly honest, the naïve. This scent is not recommended for milspouses with experiences at more than two duty stations.
Funky Frustrations: Brilliantly designed to evoke both before and after laundry memories, this is a pungent aroma of feet and a hint of dryer sheets that will whisk you away to your fanciest daydreams, full of never-ending fields, colored with shades of green and brown, where you hunt with the sharply trained eyes of a special forces warrior for those wily single socks.
MRE Mashup: Created with odors honoring your mama’s kitchen and the combat tent yours truly shares with five other men; a bold and spicy choice for the adventurous spouse.
Thank you again for shopping with us, and we hope you enjoy your personalized scent for the remainder of your military marriage. New bottles of your scent will be prepared for you upon request and can be shipped to any duty station you may happen upon.
Please note: While we support all duty stations and all military families, there will be a delay for shipments to APO/FPO overseas locations. Such delays may result from your personalized scent being confiscated upon customs inspections. We advise you to make a good stateside milspouse friend who doesn’t mind being a bold-faced liar while completing customs forms so your perfume may arrive undetected.
Would you believe you have a stronger connection to emotions and memories through your sense of smell than your other senses? Your sense of smell works differently compared to your four other senses when considering how your brain receives information. I won’t begin to try to explain this, as I’m not nearly qualified to help you interpret how our brains work, but I will tell you something.
Personally, I think scent is the weirdest of the five senses, and truthfully, I don’t think my own military life has a scent. It has a distinct feeling though—one I could not ever associate with anything other than military life.
This is why trying to connect a smell to this military lifestyle is such a fun and curious topic. My personal explanation of the scent of military life has more to do with a specific feeling than a specific smell.
So, what is it that I have come up with?
No, I didn’t combine any of the scents from the imaginary perfume-for-milspouses store as depicted above.
No, I didn’t base the above scents on my actual cares as a milspouse. (I’m not one to care about the lawn, or my service member’s laundry, or if he’s sweaty after PT, or wears his boots through the house.)
No, I didn’t exaggerate any of the perfume-scent scenarios above purely for your entertainment. (Okay, yes, yes I did. I did exactly that.)
In addition to exaggeration for the sake of humor, I did also decide what scent military life feels like the most. Seeing as how all milspouses experience this lifestyle differently, each one of us could come up with our own unique scent to feel and remember this life by—you can borrow my idea of it and find feelings and memories to make it your own.
To me, military life smells like a discontinued perfume. You loved it, you’re never going to find the same thing again, and you’ll always be searching for the right scent.
You Loved It
Well. Honestly. Would you be here participating in your very own version of a circus if you didn’t love it? Even if you don’t love it right now, right this minute, and you’re bumbling around on the internet getting lost in blogs, you did love it at some point. Can you remember why? Can you pick out a memory? Does that memory smell like anything to you?
You’ll love it so many more times, too.
Military life only has one constant: There are no constants. With that, there’s always going to be something new to discover and love as you move through this journey and… you’ll keep moving through this journey. Does your PCS binder smell like fresh school supplies or an old-as-dirt backpack?
You’re Never Going to Find the Same Thing Again
Seriously, when you’re there, in some duty station somewhere, you might not even realize it as it’s happening, but you’re going to love something.
And then…
…you’ll long for and look for whatever that something is at each new duty station. You won’t find it, of course. You won’t even find it if you travel back to that previous duty station, because your journey has changed just enough that you can’t actually go back. It might be the same place, the same food, it might even smell the same, but you’ll be there thinking something is different this time around.
You’ll Always Be Searching for the Right Scent
While you’re busy moving around, and loving things, and never finding the same things twice, all along, you’ll be looking for the right things.
You’ll have carried little pieces of each duty station location with you along the way, and by the end of your military life journey, you’ll have all the right things this life can offer.
Your experiences. Your emotions. Your memories.
Your very own sweet smelling military life.
