My Special Smell

The scent of lavender = my great grandmother.  (Everyone called her Grandma Great.)

Isn’t it weird how a certain smell connects you to the past so immediately?

Lavender entered my life one year at the San Diego County Fair.  I was young....  following Grandma Great around as she wove through areas that had little interest to me, baked goods, jams and jellies, sewn items, plants…  but then… a booth selling sachets.  It smelled soooo good!  There were all kinds of dried herbs and flowers (and who knows what) that you could purchase to put into a little rattan container.  She chose lavender. 

I still have a vivid mental image of that little container and the lavender particles that she scooped into it.  I can still see some of those little dried lavender blooms scattered around her drawers.  They must have fallen through the cracks in the rattan container. What I was doing in her drawers, I have no clue.

I’m not sure if we only did this one year.  It feels like we did it EVERY year of my childhood. Grandma Great died when I was 19, but I think of her often… and especially every time I smell lavender. 

Whenever I buy something with a choice of scent I choose lavender.  I have lavender scented lotion, body oil, candles, and incense.  I have a small bottle of lavender essential oil sitting on my desk. Sometimes I dab it onto my wrists and behind my ears.  I know that it is naturally relaxing, but it’s more than that for me, it’s my Grandma Great and all the good memories of her in my childhood.

It’s sort of mysterious how your nose is connected to the memory part of your brain, isn’t it?  I know there are probably physiological explanations, but I don’t need to know them.  I just think it’s kind of a nice miracle how one little scent can immediately flood me with good feeling.  I was going to say “memories” but it’s not just that, it’s more of a whole body/soul feeling.  A good one.

Why did my brain connect to this one smell from all the time I spend with Grandma Great?  She was a huge part of my childhood.  I’m sure there were many other smells.  In fact, she cooked breakfast on a wood burning stove every morning when we spent summers in her cabin in Montana.  But the smell of burning wood or baking biscuits, or frying trout doesn’t bring her back, only lavender.

One of my sons has told me more than once how the smell of burning wood takes him back to the comfort of laying on the floor by our wood burning stove when he was young.  He says every time he smells wood burning he feels it, and it feels “good”. I can relate to that because of the lavender.

I wonder if my other kids have “special smells” that I may have unwittingly given them.  

(Hey kids.. check in)

Do YOU have a special smell?

(1953) Lydia Frances Miller, "Grandma Great" 1888-1971

Trust...

…is knowing that a person will do what they say, when they say they will do it. 

(Yes, this includes being somewhere "on time")

(AND if something comes up that they can’t, it will be a darned good reason, and they will let me know… NOT just not do it... or be there.)

…is knowing I that can be open with a person …that they will not put me down for what I think or trample on my emotions for what I feel.    
(I feel “safe” with them.. not physically, but emotionally, which is very important to me.)

...is knowing a person accepts me for who I am and won't try to mold me to what they want me to be.

 

My definition of trust is pretty simple but, I admit, fairly demanding.  

 

My list of people I trust is very short.

I DO try hard to be to as trustworthy to others as I want others to be to me. 

  

Love???

I know what I think about TRUST. 

Also about FRIENDSHIP
(which actually involves trust)

But LOVE…???   

It seems much more complicated than either Trust or Friendship. It baffles me.

I am still trying to figure LOVE out...

Sometimes you just KNOW....

Sometimes you just know what you have to do.  It’s not what you want to do;  it’s definitely not what you had planned for your day…  but you just KNOW.  You know it will totally exhaust you… but still you KNOW you have to do it.

This doesn’t happen often…  it’s not the simple “knowing” that you should do something…  those things can be overlooked or put off to a more convenient time.  It’s the other KNOWING.. the immediate urgent KNOWING.

And after you do it, you are exhausted, but also at peace, knowing you did what you needed to do.  …Not knowing if it solved anything, but still KNOWING it was the right thing to do at the right time. ….And KNOWING you’d do it again if you had to, BUT hoping that feeling doesn’t come again too soon.

*********************

(Hummm… I used second person… maybe should have said “I” not you.  I meant “I” but assumed it applies to everyone…   I don’t mean to sound like a preacher.)