Keeping Our Center ~ Day 119

Baking bread. Cinnamon. A Christmas tree. A wind dried sheet. Lilacs. Baby flesh after a bath. The clean air after an August thunderstorm. The smell of grandma’s house. The smell of your own house. My father’s tobacco. My mother’s perfume, ironically, MY SIN. My sister’s cars in her youth, when she wanted to hide the smell of cigarettes with clouds of lemon. Polished shoes on the first day of school. My beloved fifth grade teacher, Miss Semington, and her powder laced Norwegian sweaters. ENGLISH LEATHER, which I truly believed made me reek of manhood.

Smells are sacred. They are time travelers. They can relocate a place or a person or an experience with the precision of a laser beam. Odors are uncanny in just how unforgettable they are. They seem to be quite eternal, always hovering in the atmosphere just above our ordinary days.

This is also true, maybe even more so, of those smells which stink, reek, and which are foolishly called funny. Milk gone bad. Feet at the end of a long hard run. Your pits after a night spent dancing. The contents of a baby’s early diapers. Where on earth did that come from? Mother’s milk?

A bad smell is a certain clue that something is off, something doesn’t feel right, and that there is something lurking around the corner. It is a declaration of a lack of trust in someone or a situation. It is the recognition of a pattern which shouts a warning of impending danger, be it large or small.

It is indeed the sign that something has GONE BAD, and it is understood immediately just what BAD means.

There is simply no denying a bad smell. We can’t hide our wince forever. We know when something truly stinks to high heaven. We know when something smells funny, like a bold-faced lie, or bigoted words, or acts of hatred. It can never smell like a rose.

It smells rotten. It smells spoiled. Spoiled rotten. Isn’t that what we are smelling so often these days? A culture which too often reeks of immaturity; throwing bratty tantrums; demanding that we don’t have to play by the rules; and refusing to fulfill our adult responsibilities – like taking out the garbage.

Smells. In a spiritual way, a smell has an intimate connection to our possessing a sixth sense. A sixth sense is an intuition, a hunch, a premonition, a gut feeling, an aura, an awareness, a sense that something is gravely amiss.

We express our sixth sense in terms of smelling:  this really stinks; this smells off; get a whiff of that; I would hold your nose. A smell has a spirit. A smell can be quite haunting. A smell can linger, like having fried fish. A smell speaks of the essence of a person or place. It tells a tale. It creates an atmosphere. It expresses an attitude.

Good smells. Bad smells. Either can be legendary.

As for a time in our lives when we are being called to take one day at a time, I would suggest stopping and smelling the roses. These days could use a dab of perfume.     

Bill Grimbol