Sterephene Nostalgia

So one of my summer jobs is working as an on-campus custodian at BYU. My shift goes from 5-8 am...needless to say, I'm not usually very chatty or enthusiastic at work. Right now I am on my second and last (for awhile) week of bathroom duty. It's actually not as bad as I thought it would be, probably since there is a lot less bathroom traffic in spring/summer vs. fall/winter. What really gets to me are the smells of the cleaning products I have to use. Aside from the liquid Comet we use on the sinks, which is really, really nasty, the absolute worst most nauseating smell is, ironically enough, the air freshener that is automatically dispensed every few minutes in all of the bathrooms. It smells horrible. I get angry every time I hear that little mechanical squirt, and I am severely tempted to take my broom to it and just beat the crap out of it until it stops working. I suppose I could just take out the can of spray stuff...but the broom idea is much more satisfying.

Luckily I discovered a little can of magic on Monday morning that has made my job just the tiniest bit more bearable. It's called Sterephene--a disinfectant spray that you can use on pretty much anything. Not only is it kind of fun to spray but, and I know that this is probably way weird of me, I think it smells super good. What does it smell like? I still can't quite put my finger on it but somehow the smell reminds me of DEET. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, DEET is the main ingredient in most insect repellents. It's no lilac tree, but I love the smell because it evokes some of my happiest summer memories--road trips!

The Watkins family road trips were epic (I'm sure they still are but I use the past tense since I'm a grown up now and can't take off for 3 weeks every summer and still keep my job). We have been pretty much everywhere you can possibly drive--Alaska, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, the 48 states, most of Canada, Northern Territories, the Yukon...heck we've even been to the Arctic Circle where we all dipped our toes in the frigid waters of Prudhoe Bay. One of the trips that really stands out in my memory is that first Alaskan adventure back in 1997.

It was our first road trip, I was about 8 years old and I thought it was the most exciting thing our family had ever done. I remember spending hours just sitting in the car staring intensely out the window waiting to see a moose or bear, random stops at little parks where we would make a delicious feast of beef stew on the camp stove, bonfires that would last late into the night since it never got dark, all the kids brushing our teeth and then "spitting on the Homer Spit," and driving day after day on places where we would turn a corner and stumble across some of the most pristine, beautiful lakes in the world surrounded by huge mountains and the occasional glacier.

We don't start these trips with a clear idea of where we will stay each night, Dad just kind of makes it up as he goes along, but it is always camping. We didn't usually get too rustic though. Thanks to Dad's phobia of having one of his small children fall into a pit toilet and then having to heroically fish them out, we usually found ourselves somewhere with flush toilets and indoor plumbing.But no matter how nice the bathrooms were, there were always, always, always, hordes of mosquitos just waiting to attack us as soon as the lights went out.

That first trip we were all pretty small and there were only 5 of us kids, so we slept in the van while Mom and Dad had their own tent outside. Mom's phobia is mosquitos. More particularly it is the thought of those filthy nasties sucking the blood of her darling sleeping children. We were drenched with DEET at every stop and the burning sensation of that stuff going up my nose, or the bitter taste of it when I would stick a finger in my mouth and forget that DEET had just been sprayed all over my hands, will live on in my memories forever. Each night before we climbed into bed we would get a little more of the stuff sprayed on our hands and faces, and as an extra precaution I remember Mom sitting in the van with a giant flashlight for what felt like hours, trying to squash every single mosquito in the car before we went to sleep. Despite her valiant efforts we always woke up with giant welts on our arms and faces, but I think she was more bothered by it than we were. We even turned it into a game and had a contest to see who could get the first "bite on bite"...a new mosquito bite on top of an old one. 2 year old Rachel won and her prize was a candy of her choice at the next gas station...and an extra shower of DEET every night since her blood was extra sweet.

This may seem random but as I spray that little can of Sterephene I am swept away by the memories of these good times with my family. They are memories I will always cherish, and memories that make 3 hours of mopping the floor and wiping down toilets go by a whole lot faster.