AU NATUREL

Okay, I’ll admit I’ve had yearnings to be a hippie since the summer of ’69, when hitchhikers between Toronto and Vancouver wandered into Winnipeg’s Memorial Park with their groovy love beads. My tender age and general morality protected me from their bad habits if not their fashion tastes. I took to wearing flowers in my hair and making muslin sundresses.

So it’s predictable (considering my love for all things lemon) that I succumbed when I found an online recipe for homemade lemon deodorant. It follows:

Mix ¼ cup arrowroot or cornstarch with ¼ cup baking soda. Mash in 6 tablespoons coconut oil. Add drops of lemon essential oil.

I packed the product into tiny plastic jars and, because the stuff smells so yummy, I even licked my fingers. I don’t advise that. In fact, I don’t advise you make this goop at all; it’s unpleasantly grainy to the touch, it bleeds oil from the container, and I’m not even sure it works. I’m reverting to my (slightly less hip) mineral deodorant stone.

To smell lemony, I’ll continue to depend on perfume. I have several citrusy scents to choose from: two by Jo Malone and one (my favourite) purchased in southern Italy last year—Via Camerelle by Carthusia—extracted and blended and bottled on the Isle of Capri just off the coast. One whiff of this delightful fragrance takes me back to the lemon groves of Sorrento.

I’m almost out of Via Camerelle. I’ve stalked websites and phoned department stores from Holt Refrew to Saks, but no one in North America seems to carry it. However, since I’m going to Paris in two weeks from today, I’ve decided to buy it there. Buying Italian perfume in a Parisian boutique to wear at home with Canadian mukluks is my idea of quintessential travel! And, besides, the French will probably applaud my decision to not use homemade deodorant.

A vivid and lasting memory from my wanna-be hippie days (besides I Love Lemon cologne bought on Portage Avenue at Woolworth’s five-and-dime counter and worn by many fellow Winni-boppers) comes from the “Jesus Movement” that swept cities and instigated Christian coffeehouses throughout Canada and the States at the tail end of the era. In “House of Peter,” I rubbed shoulders with longhairs who loved the Beatles and went to Woodstock and who’d been part of Haight-Ashbury ‘s summer of love—in fact, who represented the whole free-love epoch—and were now instead singing songs to the One who is Love Himself. On the one hand, they didn’t all smell as good as I did but, on the other, they sure influenced my understanding of the fragrance of true love:

And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Eph. 5:2).