soap

Our house is full - that is, both houses are full - of little bars of soap.  I like soap.  I like, that is, artisanal soap, whether made of goats milk or lavender or rose water; moulded into functional bars, like this one, or into cats or sheep or angels or spirals or goats' heads (over time, those always seem to dissolve, wherever they're kept, into a lumpy but still savory mass).  Soap is a convenient thing to buy at a farmers' market when one wants to patronize it but in all honesty doesn't want any more onions or carrots; soap - the most delicately but strongly perfumed soap, like the jasmine soap we brought back from Paris - can be carried off to dubious hotel rooms (think Serbia, or, more accurately, think London Heathrow hotels) to make them, and us, smell better.  I don't have a clue where this soap came from - and indeed, I moved it off the kitchen window sill so that it didn't itself melt - but it prompted a eulogy.