Lemony freshness is overrated

I normally love lemons.

Citrus flavors in my food...yum.
Lemonade...me gusta.
Lemons in general...I can eat them like oranges.

But I've decided, after much, much bathing, that I just can't get into the lemon-scented soap I got for Christmas. I can't dissociate the fragrance from the artificially scented cleaning and polishing products that are out on the market. (The very cleaning products that I had to give up my Saturday cartoons for all of the livelong weekends of my childhood so that we could have sparkling clean toilets and shiny end tables.) (Who makes cleaning day Saturday anyway?) (I'm not bitter.) Like a Pavlovian dog, I step into the shower, get flooded with the overwhelming lemony freshness of that bar of soap and have to stop myself from polishing my tiles. (I simply don't have time for that every morning. Sorry, Mamacusa, I know that would make you proud.) Worse yet, outside of the shower, I feel that I run the very serious risk of being unwillingly slammed face-down onto an antique table and rubbed from side to side until the cherry wood finish is sufficiently buffed and I can see my bruised, battered reflection in it. Mistaken for Lemon Pledge by a well-meaning housewife.

It could happen.