The pine tree air freshener

First encountered in a rental sedan outside Fresno, hanging from the mirror stem at the particular tilt that suggests it has been swinging, unwatched, for several thousand miles. Cut in the silhouette of a conifer it will never resemble in scent, it begins its working life at what the packaging calls black ice, a fragrance with no relationship to ice, black or otherwise, and ends it as a faint mineral memory clinging to cardboard the color of a manila folder left in direct sun. The fade is the whole story. Day one, it announces itself before the door is fully open. By week three it has receded to something a passenger notices only when asking what that smell used to be. The cardboard outperforms the scent by months, an air freshener in name only, still shaped like a tree, still hanging, doing nothing. One left clipped to a visor as a control specimen stayed eleven months, unremoved, long after it had anything left to give. This may be the most honest thing about the object: it is easier to keep a thing after its purpose than to admit the purpose is gone. What that says about the mirror it hangs from, or the driver, goes unrecorded. The tree is still there, green shape, beige everything else.

H. G. Plimsoll