Attack of the lavender bits.

I had the weirdest experience in the shower last night. You see, I order my shower/face/bath soap from this great little company in Spangle, WA. Their soaps are all super-fatted with veggie oils, all natural, flavored with herbs they grow in their own garden and essential oils, no animal products/testing/cruelty, no synthetic chemicals/scents/dyes etc., etc. The soap is...amazing. Transcendant, even. Their mint julep soap is to die for. I could eat it. My husband likes the stuff, too, in case this is all too girly for you. Let me know if you want this lady's contact info. Anyway, I tried out their lavender soap last night for the first time. You know how natural/homemade soap is made into loaves and the bars are hacked off in slices? Well, it looked like the lavender soap was made into a loaf and then scads of lavender - blossoms? pods? nuggets? - were sprinkled on top of it, so that when the bars were cut one of the long ends of the bar was covered in lavender...bits. I took the bar out of the wrapping and some of the bits fell off and I had my first moment of "um, weird" - I mean, there was this lovely purple bar with one end covered in what looked like little purply-gray bugs. Ew. But I shrugged and turned on the water. And then, what had vaguely resembled bugs came to life under the water. The shower stream made the lavender bits positively SEETHE in my hand and they started streaming off the bar of soap and down my arms, torso and legs in little buggy formations. AIEEEEEE!! It looked like I was covered in little gray...THINGS that were moving and [pant, pant, pant]...just a visceral response to a weird inanimate coincidence (small bits given life by shower spray), but my brain was still going "They're all OVER me! Gettem off, gettem off, GETTEM OFF!!" I honestly wouldn't have been surprised at that point if they had started biting.

I did firmly clamp down with my rational brain (what there is of it) and didn't do anything really dumb like yelp in horror and run screaming out of the shower, but I did quickly put the bar on the floor of the bathtub (so as to let the bits flow down the drain without using my body as a conduit) and rinsed off in a big damned hurry. And used her cinnamon soap for the rest of my personal cleansing experience. Ramon later took pity on me and scraped the rest of the bits off the end of the soap, so now I can lather up in purply, lavender-scented goodness without the fear of looking down and seeing small, moving things marching down my arms.

This lady's soap is the best I've used (hence my getting it shipped across the state), so I don't want to give people the wrong idea, but I am going to have a talk with her about putting bits of things in her soap. Especially bug-colored and -shaped ones. My imagination's just way too vivid to deal with such fine distinctions between moving tiny bits and real bugs.

Cerise