Noses

It's Spring - and my nose goes crazy!  But not merely in the pollen-induced sneezing sort of way. No, God blessed me with a nose that can smell snow on a distant mountain top from way down in Southern California.  If there is an orange blossom bursting open, I can find it.  And tonight, at 10 pm I stepped outside and could have told you that the wind was blowing in from the northeast....because there was the peculiar odor of livestock in the air coming from Chino.

It's the nose on over-drive that perplexes me.  A female, hormonal thing, perhaps, this ability to sit bolt upright out of the middle of a sound sleep, detecting the specific jar of seasoning my husband is using on his chicken breast as he cooks his after-work dinner at 2:30 a.m.  I came into my "senses" quite young, as a sixth-grader riding a bus with my Grandmother through Everett, Washington.  Sound asleep - it had been a long bus ride from British Columbia - I woke to a choking stench that was quickly identified as..."Oh, that's just the pulp mills in Everett."  Mercy.

So, noses are set on our faces, not just to inform our brains of what needs tending to, i.e.: diapers, fires, when the cake is done in the oven; no, noses are also our compass that points us to things that delight us, but we might otherwise miss: the warm scent in the crook of a loved-one's neck, the calming breeze wafting in from a not-so-far-off beach, and that subtle change in the air that heralds spring's return.  It's dirt, and rain, and new blades of grass - - and have you found anything to rival the sweetness of the first violet of spring?