Sometimes something just needs to be said.

For literally years, I felt irked by what had seemed an inexplicable error in one of the world’s most beloved Christmas movies. Apologizing for crashing his car into an unequivocally individual tree, character George Bailey is met with comment from a person, evidently more disoriented than he, about two trees. Why, oh why, was this, I have wondered on numerous occasions in bed when going over life’s most pressing unanswered questions and then completely forgetting about the matter until getting ready to go to sleep some other time.

It always felt too absurd to actually look up, this inwardly perplexing mystery, but, when I finally did, I felt relieved to see that my questions about it were broadly shared.

Another Mystery

One saving grace of quarantine has been a ready waft of fragrance amid a stream of news stories about a bizarre-sounding loss of olfactory sense. But, mid-pandemic, I began to notice that one of my very favorite – and preciously conserved – perfumes seemed harder and harder to find online. Without any sort of announcement, Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s APOM Femme – this triumph of gentle, calming, wind-down sophistication – suddenly seemed to be sold out almost everywhere, and I began to wonder, would it be removed from the world permanently?

Finally, finally, I reached out to the company only to be told that “like a painter retouching his painting, a musician his score to improve its rendering or modernize its theme, Francis Kurkdjian wishes to give APOM new impetus.”

Jarring, I thought. It’s not like Leonardo da Vinci painted over any of his masterpiec …. I mean …

It’s not like Banksy … Nevermind.

Although I am not able to afford to restock, APOM has existence value to me, especially during lockdown. And, while it is not as if I believe for a moment that this creative genius, Francis Kurkdjian, as part of some diabolical plan, set out to force Americans in the middle of a smell pandemic to begin comfort-spraying our quarantine pillows with fragrances spritzed on us like ambushed prey at malls like middle schoolers, that this change was initiated without warning and without proactive acknowledgment is disappointing.

People who normally cannot afford perfumes may make sacrifices for their sake – even if only a few drops can be rationed per day – during smell pandemics.

During normal life, now would be a perfect time to try something new, one may argue; but, aside from the fact that many of us are finally at a point in which we feel literally done with testers of all types for all time, perfume tryouts have begun to feel impractical. So, I, and, I imagine, many others battling tired skepticism will wait.

Until then, we will be over here, ugly crying, listening to Dr. Fauci on television dictating what I am sure are not – but what still feel like – arbitrary Simon Says commands for what I am guessing will be another month or so, dousing ourselves in Penhaligon’s.