Olfactory Lane

     I have always had a very acute sense of smell. My eyesight requires some assistance, my ears are what I consider to be average (a little selective hearing loss), my taste buds work just fine, and at this point in my life, my nerves still work as well as they ever have. But my sense of smell....it's a little overactive. I have woken from a dead sleep to walk around my house sniffing the air to figure out what smells 'off'. I've woken John and insisted that something was on fire. If someone in a five mile radius of our house lights a fire I smell it almost instantly. When Zoe was still in diapers, I could tell she needed changed almost before she could.
     I also have a very strong sense of  'smell association'. Scientists say that smell and memory are so closely linked because they are processed in the same area of the brain, the area which also processes emotions. Because we encounter most new odors in our childhood and youth, certain smells have the ability to make an association with a childhood memory. I am a perfect example of this.
     Freshly brewed coffee puts me in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, with my Dad at the table. A freshly mowed lawn conjures up a picture of him standing outside the garage of the same house, sharpening mower blades. A baking pie finds me again in that house, at the table watching my step mom make pie crust from scratch, with a gingham apron over her clothes. Oatmeal cookies baking in the oven will transport me to the kitchen of my maternal grandparents, a Tupperware container on the top of a dishwasher, and my Great Aunt Esther standing with her back to me at the stove. My Grandpa Kliment smelled like Old Spice...and he's been gone for nearly ten years. The smell of cow manure puts me at the top of a hay shed where I was not supposed to be, with my brother who was supposed to be watching me, laying on our bellies at the top, watching my uncle feed dairy cattle. The smell of a horse will always bring up a picture of Beauty, a black and white horse who belonged to the same uncle.
     Chlorine invokes the old pool in Wahoo, and finds me standing at the edge of the high dive, working up courage. Pine Sol sends me back to the Hinky Dinky deli, with a mop in my hand.
     Chocolate chip cookies smell like my kids, and a kitchen in Trenton, where we ate more dough than cookies and laughed so hard our stomachs ached. Depending on which laundry soap I happen to be using, I am either standing in the utility room at my Grandma Cejka's, where in my mind, I watch her iron my grandfather's shirts, or on the front porch of my Grandma Kliment's, following her out the door to the clothes line.
     I can not smell Axe body wash and not think of John. That is the reason why, if he leaves for the week on Monday morning, I sleep in his shirts all week while he's gone. Zoe has a blanket (Nankie with the Holes In It) that she's slept with nearly every night of her life, and I have caught myself smelling it during the day if I miss her while she's at school.
     They are not always good memory associations. The smell of Jack Daniel's invokes a kind of anxiety I can not explain. The smell of cinnamon Schnapps triggers my gag reflex. The smell of blood makes me recall a crash on a bicycle that sent me over the top of the handlebars and took the skin from my chin, forearms, right hip, knees, and the top of my right foot. Lilies smell like funerals and they make me want to cry.
     The same scientists who explain these triggers say that we begin to form these memory associations in the womb. Maybe that's why yesterday during church I smelled my mother. It's not the first time. I think...though I am not at all sure...it's Jovan White Musk.
     I don't think there is anyone who could tell me, for sure, that she wore that perfume. She's been gone for almost 33 years. I don't have a single concrete memory of her. For some reason, my brain has formed a link between a woman I do not remember and this particular scent. I wasn't sad. I was comforted. It felt like an arm around my shoulder and a kiss on my forehead. It felt like a little white house in Weston. It felt like acceptance and love. It felt like peace. And no matter the reason, real or imagined, I am so grateful.