itsawonderfilledlife

I have experience the longest four weeks of my life, with hubby, our son, and youngest daughter away on an adventure! The feeling has been similar to the expectancy of the birth of a baby, or the waiting for your wedding day! And, with all three of these times of waiting, they culminate with embracing, words of love and drinking in their scent, which you know so intimately as belonging to someone who is yours.

Kind of like … dogs. You know, you take your beast for a walk, and are walking towards another person and their beast. Both people say ‘hi’, and the beasts … well they go for the sniff and lick … seriously, THAT is something I can’t wait to get to heaven and ask God that most theological of questions … ‘why do dogs sniff each other’s butts?’ But I digress.

But really, the familiarity of a scent, that is the evidence of an intimate relationship.

To inhale their scent, that, to a mom, says they are mine. I remember one other time when hubby was away, and, on the phone I told him that I missed his scent. His response was to pass gas, so I could at least hear it … we are so from two very different planets! Believe me, there are some scents that, as a woman, I could never miss! (I know this is a universal woman thing too … a few weeks back, my daughter says, ‘Mom, I so miss having girls with me … my brother had a chili dog today … and I’m confined to the car with the effects of it!’).

We may know many people, and we might even know their cologne, or perfume, or hand lotion, or even soap, but to know their individual scent … your relationship has to be closer, more physical, more intimate.

When I go to the East Coast to visit my family, it is not just my mother’s embrace that holds me to her, but her familiar scent. I cannot imagine anything forcing the memory of the scent of my mom from my mind.

I am sure I could be blindfolded, and still be able to identify those most intimately connected to me, by sniffing their necks (okay, it would also be easy to identify hubby, as his is covered with whiskers).

Now, don’t get me wrong, we are not just sitting around sniffing each other. We will talk, we will hug (we are ‘huggers’), we will play, we will travel, we will see sights, we will go to the beach (I wonder if the South East Beach smells like a North East beach? I swear I can still be one hundred miles from the East Coast, and I can smell it … home). But those first moments, those first hours together, it is our sense of smell that was and will be most keenly reunited.