My son has a keen sense of smell, perhaps dog like, sniffing out the familiar. "I smell Liba! Why does it smell like Liba's house right here?" he'll proclaim at a random spot along the bike path. "And you smell like bananas, Mama!" he'll tell me first thing in the morning when I wake up, or sometimes, if I'm lucky, banana bread. And sometimes he smells other people and places, like suddenly out of the blue—in the mall, in the winter, in a corporate hallway, in the night—"I smell preschool! I smell the beach in San Diego! I smell Granny!"
And the truth is, sometimes I wonder if the time will come when he says "I smell Mama," perhaps years down the line, when he has kids of his own, grandkids even, if he will still have the innocence to proclaim such things with loving authority—for to stop for a moment of your busy life, pausing to smell and identify, to link the moment with memory, is to love.
Perhaps walking in the woods, in the middle of a dance class learning to Lindy Hop or Hip Hop, perhaps sitting in meditation or in Warrior 1 Pose, swimming in the ocean, or singing loudly in the car, or perhaps when I'm long gone, in and among the many things and places we've together traversed over the years, he'll suddenly smell me in the trees—"I smell Mama!"—a wordless knowing, like bananas, like love and longing, like childhood.
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