Cinnamon Bugs

Just a few minutes ago I put my computer to sleep for the night and went downstairs to turn out the lights. As I unplugged the cinnamon air freshener infuser from the wall, the scent caught me in just the right way and I began to laugh at the memory that came to mind.

1990: Kathryn and I were seventeen year old freshmen living in our very first dorm room, both very softhearted eco-friendly types (actually, we still are!). Dorms being what they are (lots of people and food in a tightly cramped space), and this one somewhat older and unremodeled to boot, we had the occasional unwanted creepy crawly visitor in our room.

Now, I’m not sure if it was because we couldn’t afford a can of bug spray, or if we didn’t want the toxic chemicals in our room, or if we just thought we were being clever, but our solution to this problem was to keep an old Clairol hairspray spritz bottle filled with a mixture of water and a whole lot of cinnamon oil. Any time we saw something crawling around the floor or on the wall, we would douse the living shit out of the poor creature with this cinnamon oil mixture.

I do not for the life of me remember if it actually did any good or not. Probably what we were doing was just slowly drowning a lot of bugs.

But our room sure smelled good!