Smell

How often do you use your nose? Whatever your answer, it's not enough. The world is full of smells. Good and bad smells. Smell can tell you something about your environment that you could never see with your eyes. And my favourite part of using my nose is the memories.

I read once that smell is the sense that connects easiest with memories. For example:

The other day I passed a colleague in the hall and had a sudden flashback of my first job after college. The reason for this was her perfume, the same as that first boss' wife.

When I walk into the men's room at work I'm always reminded of being drunk. Not any specific instance (there aren't very many), just the overall feeling of having had too much to drink. I always go to the bathroom to drink water when I've had too much alcohol, so my brain made a link.

One of my best friends works for Aromatic Apothecary, among other things. Many evenings we all get together for coffee and the entire room would be filled with a complex mixture of incense and oils emanating from her clothes. It makes for quite an olfactory adventure.

Restaurants always carry the most amazing smells. You become hungry simply walking into the place.

And of course nature. Walking between the car and the shop sometime last week, I picked up on a most amazing scent. I mentioned it, and was shown a pine tree growing across the road in a field. That's it. A single tree. It was lovely.

Often I can smell the rain coming. There's a pressure in the atmosphere but my nose screams of fresh water. A storm is coming.

For the last two weeks everything smells of burning wood. It's not a nice smell. It's a warning. Animals tend look around, work out the direction of the threat, and move to somewhere safe. Even my two rats stand up in their cage when there's a fire coming.

I've completely lost the plot that this article almost never had. It's more a musing than a train of thought. I hope it makes you use your nose a bit more...