Four tubes deep, and calm about it
Somewhere in the moves, I became a woman who keeps spares. Not of everything. Of the things whose absence announces itself at the worst hour, and toothpaste is the king of that category. There is no good time to squeeze a flat tube, but ten at night with an early start is the classic. So the bathroom cupboard in this house holds toothpaste the way other cupboards hold candles, against a small emergency that may never come, and I sleep the better for it.
These days the spares are a four-pack of Colgate MaxFresh, the clean mint one with the tiny breath strips folded through the paste. Full-size tubes, big ones, and four at once means the subject is closed for a long while. A few things I can report from the far side of the first two tubes:
- The mint is confident without being cruel. Some pastes scorch. This one leaves the fresh feeling and skips the punishment, and you can drink your tea after without the tea tasting wrong for half an hour.
- The little blue flecks are the breath strips. They dissolve as you brush. Kẹo was deeply suspicious of them for exactly one evening.
- The freshness genuinely lingers. Not until lunch, whatever anyone says, but well through the school run.
- A four-pack removes a whole species of errand. This is the true review.
- The last tenth of the tube resists you. Every tube ends its life folded over and pressed under a firm thumb, which is either a flaw or a family tradition, and in this house the flat tubes are Thành's department. He approaches them like an engineering problem.
Fifteen thousand reviews sit close to five stars, most of them families like ours buying it again on schedule. I will say plainly that the strips are about freshness, a pleasant trick rather than a medical one; the fluoride underneath is doing the real work, same as it ever did. Buy it for clean teeth and a kind mint. The theatre of the blue flecks comes free.
The cupboard is down to two spares as I write this, which by my private arithmetic means it is nearly time to order again. Some people track the seasons by the garden. I have my own instruments.
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