Saturday, March 17, 2012

Spring


Well, so much for that "February Challenge."  But rather than dwell on that loss I'll divert your attention in another direction.   

I wonder if anyone has the same problem as me.

Let me tell you about it.  The memory-switch in my brain is connected to all my senses, but the connection between it at my nose is the strongest.  Let me give a couple of examples.  Today I happened to be in a room full of supplements and herbs, but the scent of it took me straight back to the age of five and an old health food store that my mom frequented.  After that whiff I could almost immediately taste the Alta Dena Raspberry Frozen Yogurt that she used to let me get for a treat. That was a good memory.  Then, later today, the rain poured for a good twenty minutes.  When that happens, the creosote bushes around the valley unleash their fragrance into the desert.  I stood outside my house watching my kids splash around but the scent in the air carried me to my sophomore year in high school when it rained for a week straight.  That week also happened to be a part of my own John Hughes movie (if I may be so dramatic).  Even 20 years later the distinct physical pain of a "crush unrequited" can sit in my stomach.  Be it for a millisecond but the rain, the creosote, the smell of wet cement, they conspire to remind me.  

What bugs me the most about this memory connection is that it seems like the bad memories hit harder than the good ones.  They punch me in the gut.  They pull down at my mood.  And their impact lingers too long.   Just last month I walked in some fresh fallen snow.  And while I wondered what exactly it is that I smell in the snow,  I had a flash back to real heartbreak. It was more than crush unrequited when it snowed for two weeks straight my sophomore year of college. I could smell that snow all over again.  My reverie of new fallen snow was gone.  That stupid memory hit me and though I knew it would pass, it bothered.  It was real and tangible and I just had to walk away from the snow.  Like it wasn't fresh anymore, but tainted. I went back into the house looking for better, newer scents.  

So I'm in this sensory dilemma again.  It's spring.  Usually, I love spring in Las Vegas.  It comes early and dissolves in the sun by May, but it also brings me my birthday so I'll forgive its shortness.  My last two springs have been less than stellar.  OK, the worst, in fact.  And while I constantly remind myself that life moves forward, all it takes is a subtle breeze of desert springishness to cross my nose and then I'm jolted back in time quicker than one point twenty-one gigawatts and a DeLorean ever could.  It's a shadow of a stomach ache and hint of losing my breath, but it's there and it's a killjoy.  It carries me to days of loss, spent in bed watching Audrey Hepburn movies, eating chocolate ganache ice cream or to other days spent trying to hold it together for the sake of my kids.  

"Time heals all wounds."  That's what they say right?  That's why I have it in quotation marks because "they" say it.  And I agree, but I feel like my sense of smell likes to pick at the scabs.  

Does anyone else have this problem?  Or is it just me?
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*Artwork by Mary Blair