It Scent Me Back

I like having growing things around me, so it was a natural thing for my girls to put a couple of packages of bulbs into my stocking at Christmas. But they couldn't stop there, of course - no way. Being the funny girls that they are, they also included a small ceramic cup shaped like a Santa head. With it came a compressed "coin" of soil, and grass seeds - the idea being that the soil fills the Santa head, the grass is pressed into the soil, and the grass grows, looking like Santa has a spiked, green hairdo...rather like a chia pet, er, without the chia.

It was a joke, of course, so, also of course, I put it all together and placed it on my kitchen windowsill. The sight of that silly thing gives me a smile every day. And in the middle of winter, it's always nice to have a little green, too. But today it gave me something extra.

Santa was looking pretty ragged and wild, so I pulled out my scissors and gave him a haircut. He looked immediately better - and rather like my father in the 60's and 70's when he had a flat-top. Of course, Dad never went for green hair, so the likeness was fleeting. But then I lifted the little guy up to my nose and took a sniff.

Now, my daughters and husband, and just about anyone else who knows me, will find nothing unusual in that. I sniff just about everything - food, leaves, books, paint, sticks, squished ants (don't ask) - smell is a very important part of my life experience and I include it purposefully in my memory imprint. (No, really - quit wondering about the squished ants. I'm not going to tell that story.) So raising that small plant to my nose wasn't surprising. But the result did surprise me.

The first whiff transported me to the house I lived in until I was ten. I was upstairs standing at the window and our neighbor was cutting his grass just below me. I don't know why the smell took me there. I've lived several decades since then and, I assure you, we cut our grass at all of the places we lived! Perhaps this was the same variety of grass as that growing there in Detroit. But, for whatever reason, that smell took me right back to eight years old. What an incredible power! I could feel the screen pressing into my nose, the windowsill under my hands, hear the whirr and catch of our neighbor's push mower and the birds twittering in his cherry tree. It was like magic. All of that from one little whiff of just-cut grass in my kitchen in California in the middle of winter.

So, today's beautiful thing is the delightful way that scent can spring a memory (especially when it doesn't include squished ants)!