We can have a lot of fun with our noses.
It's an incredibly powerful sense, our sense of smell or olfaction. It's known as the scent most closely tied to our emotional memories, with certain smells immediately sending floods of recollections pouring over our minds. Smells may not recall specific moments in time, but because the sensation of memories that follow smells of significance is so quick, sometimes those memories are just blurs of emotion and glimpses of feelings we may once have had.
We feel the memories without actually playing them like movies in our heads.
I was recently back home in Huron County, the heart of southwestern Ontario's rural community, Ontario's west coast and the home of smells that really set off my nostalgic funny bones.
The first smelly experience one usually encounters when entering Huron County is the wonderful tickling sensation in the nose that can only be triggered by the biological wonders of manure. It's weird to consider but with farmers cleaning out their barns while I was vacationing at home I found the pungent clouds of stink drifting out from the hog barns to be comforting and not at all offensive.
I'm certainly no farmer - I've been oddly called "city-folk" by friends of mine who actually did grow up on a farm - but there is still something warmly familiar about driving through the country and soaking up all those smells many people are usually seeking relief from whenever they're encountered.
Growing up in town, I still lived no more than a few hundred metres from the horse barn at the local track, which features harness racing each Sunday. The musty aromas of stale hay washed over me like an old friend.
It's not that my tasteless nose is completely indiscriminate when it comes to smells. I'm not quite like a dog that doesn't distinguish good and bad scents.
Driving down Hydro Line to Waterloo with the windows down provided more opportunity for memories in my mind that I can't necessarily place. When passing a woodlot late in the day, the dewy grasses and mixture of brush and old decaying trees was intoxicating. The burst of cool air creeping out of the shaded area helped complete the serene experience.
Everyone has their own associations with different scents, usually attributed to things that give off particularly strong aromas. Whether it's freshly mown grass, coffee or pine. Pine is something I strongly associate with. Whenever I go to my grandparents' cottage, it's driving down the laneway with sticky pine sap fragrance in the air that really sets off my sense of peace.
A quick conversation with some people in the office found strong associations with gasoline, which is far too toxic smelling for me, and cucumbers. I don't honestly think I've ever really smelled cucumber, but apparently some people really get down on sniffing those oblong vegetables. Celery is more up my alley. I don't even know why it's something I have a strong association with, but despite it's sharpness, slicing into a celery stick is an almost therapeutic experience.
My associations with different smells and the feelings they gave me were particularly striking because I don't generally have any of those same feelings in Estevan. It's so much more noticeable when returning home how these smells affect us.
With more time in the Energy City I'm sure the bonds between my nose and my emotions will become more defined. Until that happens, it's always a treat to soak up the scents of my childhood and hometown.
