"This smells like kindergarten." That is exactly what I was hoping for. Today I had my congregation reflect on what they loved doing when they were children. This is a question I have been exploring for the last year or so. The question is one that was asked in a great book by the Sheila, Dennis & Matthew Linn called Healing the Purpose of Your LIfe. (Their books are really great you should check them out.) Anyway the question they ask reader to reflect on is What were you doing when your parents called you in for dinner, that thing, that toy you just couldn't pull yourself away from. So as some of you know I'm not preaching this summer instead I have invited congregants to respond to some questions, questions that I have hoped would encourage them to think more intentionally about what they believe. Well anyway today one of my folks talked about truth, not technically one of the questions but whatever. He talked about truth telling and how in speaking truth we are also getting closer to God. So following him I invited folks to reflect on the ways in which we have forgotten who we are. The truth that we have forgotten about ourselves. The way I did that was to invite them to answer the childhood question. And I had them play with playdough or color with crayons. Both activities are classic childhood activities. They also evoke memories of touch and smell. Playdough has a distinctive smell. Much more evocative memories than if we had just thought about what we did as children. All in all it was a great activity.
So other smells that hold strong memories for me: Old Spice makes me think of my maternal grandfather. He wore it all the time. One Christmas all he asked for was Old Spice. So we bought him tons of Old Spice. He just kept opening Old Spice after Old Spice. We then gave him a recliner that we had been hiding. But it is a great memory. (He also never asked for Old Spice for Christmas again.) I remember a few years after he died my family was in the mountains of North Carolina and some man who lived in the area picked up my cousins to bring them back to the cabin. My cousin Jonathan who was very young at the time came in crying because the man reminded him of GrandDoc, that is what he called him. The older grandchildren called him Doc which is what his father had called him. Freshly mown grass reminds me of my paternal grandfather. He mowed grass nearly all of his life. He would mow and my grandmother would do the raking. Are there smells that evoke memories for you?
The smeller's the feller.
2 comments:
I thought about what I was doing when I got called to the kitchen table, and I remember playing Barbies. We had a closet that we had turned into a "Barbie house." Each shelf was a different floor. My sister and I would play a lot. Anytime my friends would come over, it was straight to the closet for Barbies. I LOVED to play house. (not to mention, I had Western Ken and he was a hottie!) As for smells, I won a wood flute when I was in 5th grade. I was in Beginning band and playing the flute, but I guess there was a band camp or something and I won a wooden flute. It smelled very acidic. I remember playing it and smelling that odor, but I'm sure today if I caught wind of that smell again -- almost like potent glue -- I'd think of the flute. Hmm . . . now that I've identified it with glue, I wonder how high I got smelling the flute . . . That would explain a lot.
Old Spice reminds me of my maternal grandfather, who also wore it all of the time. Since he lived in CA and we lived in MD, we didn't see him often, but I still associate the smell with good memories of our visits. (He's my only living grandparent now, and is living in an assisted living home in Brevard, NC, so that my mom can visit with him every day.)
A smell I've recently rediscovered, and that doesn't recall specific memories so much as simply the sensation of being excited about school, is freshly sharpened pencil. I have to confess, when reading graduate stuff that feels over my head and underlining things I probably won't remember the reason for later, to doing some extra pencil sharpening, just so I can hold that scent under my nose while I attempt to decipher the jibberish.
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