Smells often overlooked until they aren’t there
by BARBARBA M. DICKINSON

Are you, Gentle Readers, a bit overexposed to lovely Trisha Meili, her identity revealed at last as “the Central Park jogger”? If you didn’t catch her on the “Today” show you may have seen CNN’s Larry King interview. Or any number of talk show venues. Always smiling, always courageous, always as fragile as a newly hatched chick. And yet true grit and steel.

For my part, I cannot get enough of just looking at her. I want to sit and marvel at her resilience and the fact that she has survived. While I ogle and ponder her being with us in any condition, much less looking thoroughly cover girl glamorous, I cannot help but grieve at the one thing she admits losing: her sense of smell. Compar-ed to the horrendous evil that befell her on an April night 14 years ago, this is almost a trivial deficit.

I have a fairly keen sense of smell, one that I have thus far in life taken for granted. But after listening to Trisha Meili repeat that she was robbed of her ability to smell and confessing that the loss scares her a bit, I have become more grateful for my well-functioning olfactory glands.

Take this morning, for example. Minutes before I heard the footfall of my husband’s soft slippers on the stairs I smelled the fresh, hot coffee he was bringing to me. Is there any more tantalizing aroma in the world? (A rhetorical question: certainly. A plump chicken roasting slowly in an oven can and does bring grown men to their knees with anticipatory pleasure.) But steaming java can move me to write more pages, clean dozens of closets, dig acres of gardens faster than any vitamin or tonic.

Consider Mother Nature’s bounty of blossoms this June month. The world fairly bursts with roses, marigolds, geraniums, peonies, and honeysuckle. Each blossom carries a scent as distinctive as its foliage and its bloom. Nor should we forget grass. Around our block the hum of lawnmowers is as ever-present as the smell of new mown grass, tangy and sweet as a summer shower.

One of my personal garden pleasures is a miniscule herb garden. Unpretentious, unassuming and often neglected, it nevertheless yields bountiful leafy greens throughout the summer. A wise friend once cautioned me that herbs are nothing but weeds and should be treated as such – with careful disrespect. Basil, oregano, rosemary, lemon thyme, dill. One sniff and you’re rewarded with visions of exotic cuisines. Or at the very least, rich spaghetti sauce with homegrown, fresh oregano bubbling in the pot.

If I were forced to list my favorite smells, baby smells would undoubtedly head the list. I loved kissing the back of my babies’ bare little necks and nuzzling their downy heads fresh from a shampoo.

I wish I had spent more time nuzzling and hugging; my children are all too old to allow me that indulgence today. When visiting one of my grandchildren and catching a whiff of baby powder or lotion, memories flood back. Yes, babies and all the accoutrements attendant to infants have legions of scents and smells that linger in the mind and on the nose.

Other favorite smells on my if-I-were-forced-to-write list? An eclectic range from fresh bed linens, indelible new-car odors, small puppies and lilacs in bloom in the spring.

I keep remembering the tragedy of Trisha Meili’s singular loss of smell. It makes me want to inhale, gulp, sniff, breathe more deeply of all the wonders of this world and do it doubly, for Trisha Meili and me.

Author and freelance writer Barbara Dickinson lives in the Roanoke Valley.

Comments or questions? E-mail to comments@primeliving.net.