W is for wood smoke

High on the list of found items is scent. It’s not so much that you find it – it finds you. That’s the beauty of it.

Walking to do the afternoon school pick up, I was overtaken by the smell of wood smoke. It’s early October, and those with working fireplaces are starting to think about fires.

I wrote about woodsmoke a while ago. It’s one of those borrowed things: something that my parents both enjoy, and that I have learned to love as a result of seeing their response.

I am getting more aware of smells just now – particularly, the opportunity to take in lovely smells. Walking to school, through a residential area with lots of nice gardens, there are good opportunities to do just this.

To stop and smell roses. It may sound like a cliche, but I do it anyway, especially where the roses are just by the front wall of the property.

To run your fingers through a lavender bush. Again, if they are overhanging a fence, or growing through a gate, it’s perfect. Fun too to see the lavender in all its growing stages, including the ones where it looks a bit like cuckoo spit, with little white drops hanging on the plant.

Some smells on this walk are less sought after. Sadly, there is a strong smell of urine by a particular bench I pass. I can only hope that this is not someone’s regular stop off.

Scent these days seems so often chosen for you, rather than encountered. The supermarkets that install bakeries near the entrance, and waft baking smells over you as you enter.

The growing number of places that squirt it over you – sometimes as much as ever five minutes, it seems. Good idea in principle for public toilets – less good when it catches you in the face as you straighten up from the washbasins.

But the smells of wet undergrowth on the cycle path – or piles of cut grass going a little brown around the edges – or the lingering nature of last night’s cooking smells that greet you the next morning…

These I welcome. They remind me that my body is in the real world, even if my head is jumping between lists and memories and ‘need to take that out of the freezer’ thoughts.

Among all those ‘life is too short’ statements: surely life is too short not to enjoy good smells, when we get the chance. And to go looking for them, when we need topping up.