Leather

It's October, my favorite month.  Fall is my favorite season.  Halloween is my favorite holiday (plus no family obligations).  Scary movies are on for the whole month. Walking on the crunchy leaves is so romantic. You need to wear a coat. Haunted houses with the boy you like are a-maaaaz-ing. The newness of the school year is still there.  Pumpkins. And, the best reason ever:

My husband lets me bring out the space heater!  I position it on my nightstand and revel in the steady hum and heat.  It really only heats my face.  The rest of my body is cold. The dichotomy makes shivers run down my back. I like the shivers; it's a fascinating sensation.  Eventually the space heater heats up the whole room sufficiently so that I feel completely warm, the shivers stop, and the whole experience seems immensely less gratifying.

I am enamored with sensory experiences. Smelling and hearing especially.  I have really good hearing. I can detect the way a Honda engine turns over. I know all the various noises our house makes and freak out if there's a subtle new noise that I can't identify. Husband likely can't hear it or doesn't think it's anything important.  Nope, there's some meaning behind the noise, and I need to figure out why that noise is going on. 

I love the smell of leather. I like going into Wilson Leather and smelling everything. However, that's new leather. New leather smells different than old leather. Worn-in leather has traces of body oils, perfumes, smoke occasionally, and holds the mysteries of the person who wears it.

I had a leather coat. As a coat, it sucked. The lining was satin, which isn't a warm fabric in my opinion. But I didn't buy it for its warming properties. I bought it because I wanted to smell it. To make it an actually useful coat, I think it should have a fleece lining. However, that probably goes against some law about not combining sheep and cows into one garment. My coat slowly became worn in, and it became a more comfortable smell that I ceased to notice as much. Until I started dating a guy who also had a worn-in leather jacket, and I realized that his jacket had a completely different smell than mine. It probably was because I had been around mine for so long that I smell-tuned-it-out. I loved smelling his jacket with traces of his cologne and smoke and him and dirt and that fluid they used in photography dark rooms. I was so fascinated by the coat that he offered to give it to me to wear. He obviously didn't understand that if I wore it, it would start to smell like me and lose the novelty. 

I would totally have a leather coat (even if it had an awful satin lining) right now if it weren't for the fact that it's socially unacceptable to own leather. I do support the cow cause since I don't eat beef. My reason for not having a leather coat isn't just that I fear PETA torching me.