"I smell a gun," my three year-old grandson says to me as he heads for the spare room where we keep his toys. Lately I've noticed that he uses "smell" interchangeably with "want". Kids do stuff like that. He'll figure out soon enough that his ping pong ball weapon of choice has only the slight patina of cheap plastic and not much smell at all. This got me thinking about noses and how we mostly fail to appreciate the gift that is our olfactory lobe.
If you want to truly understand a place or thing you need to smell it. How many times have you found yourself someplace from which you have long been absent yet it is instantly recognizable to you because it smells the same as you remember it. Your eyes and ears may not register recognition but your nose has an unfailing memory. Smell, I think, is predominantly an emotional sense. Think about it. Just a whiff of perfume on a letter tucked away for many years or a particular blooming flower can transport you back to a significant event in your life. I remember being in fourth or fifth grade when one of the girls in our class was helping the teacher pass out tests or papers of some kind. As she walked by my desk I detected a hint of perfume that had me instantly "in love" with her. It was probably Radio Girl or some other dime store fragrance but to me it was instant swoon. I would recognize it anywhere. (Call me, Joan!) Carter Hall pipe tobacco has the smell that will always recall "Dad" just as Lilly of the Valley is an instant hit of "Mom". Babies and old folks have an aroma all their own. Burning bacon and diesel fumes never fail to put me back in the Army, as does the smell of wet canvas and dirt.
This new appreciation of the nose was inspired by a recent trip to northern Idaho. The pine and smell of brand new leaves on soft wood trees like maple took me back to my grade school years in Michigan and the springtime smell of lilac bushes transported me to the backyard of a house I haven't seen in more than fifty years. My head was reeling with each inhalation of that beautiful fragrance and I was a kid again for just a few minutes.
Kipling said it in his poem Lichtenberg, about an Australian trooper who smells the blossoms of a tree and is reminded of his home in New South Wales:
"Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-strings crack-
They start those awful voices o'nights
That whisper, "Old man, come back!"
Old Rudyard knew the power of a good nose.
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