TTA 6-17-08

I don't always feel like writing what the "Tuesday Tell All website" gives you as an idea...but they have given out the senses for 5 weeks, and don't think I can pass on any of them.

Really, I can't imagine being without even one of them.

Last weeks assignment was SMELL and my memory is provoked by smell.

When I come across a rainy day, fresh cut grass, a bar of soap, stinky fish, pine trees and even stanky trash, my mind starts flashing pictures of my past. Maybe everyone has this built into them, I dont know. One thing I do know is that my nose is an amazing device. Especially when your pregnant. I wish men could understand this phenomenon that happens when your belly is the keeper of a little human.

Let me share, if I may:

I will never forget this one morning I experienced while living in Ensenada, Mexico. I was pregnant, maybe 3 months along, with my first child...of course my nose is in hyper-mode. I remember waking up that morning slightly nauseous and for breakfast ate a handful of carrots. I walked to work every morning...which was only about 200 yards or so. But, the way I went was right along the ocean on a road that sat on a ocean wall, and there was almost always a slight breeze. We lived about 1 mile south from a fish factory...yikes to a prego nose.

The smell wasn't always there but with that slight breeze, yep you guessed it, it was there!

Some days you could choke on the smell and others days you never knew that it was there, except for the black cloud of birds that swarmed the huge building.

Well, this morning the smell was in the air. Then add, if you dare, the slight smell of sewage draining down the ocean wall that I was walking along. Again...that smell wasn't always there either...it just so happened that on that day, it reared it's ugly head.

So....as I get closer to work, the sewage smell is getting stronger and stronger. I notice my pace getting faster and the collar of my shirt goes right to my nose. I am looking around to find the horrible smell and where it might be coming from. ( It wasn't strange to see a dead sea animal on the beach, and those stink like something fierce) Well, it wasn't a deal animal. Oh....just a diesel tanker of raw sewage that had accidentally tipped on it's side and was seeping into the ground. NICE! I could see the workers trying to stop the leak, but I had come a little early.

At this point I am quite eager to make it to the safety of my sweet smelling, candle lit office. Just as I make it past that stench..I walk past the kitchen, just in time to catch a wif of them preparing for lunch. I am sure at any other moment, food would of been an amazing smell. But not right then...I was overloaded. And let me point out that this all happened at about 9am! Good Stuff.

Man...as nasty as it was..I will never forget the smells on that morning!

I remember laughing to myself once I reached my office. Then trying to explain it all to my husband at lunch. Which, lunch for me was another handful of carrots.