Smells…

Smells bring me right back in time

Brut, that cheap cologne of the seventies, reminds me of that boy with the dark curls and blue, blue eyes I fell in love with way back when

Claire Burke room spray and potpourri brings me right back

to the one bedroom, furnished apartment where the Hubs and I began our marriage

A year after mama died, I opened her pocketbook, finally ready to deal with the odds and ends inside

When her smell came wafting out, I was overcome with the grief of missing her

Ghana, it has a certain smell

Not bad, not good,  just different

Fires burning, garbage rotting, rain and wind, spicy jollof rice, fish, plantain slices frying in palm oil

The potpourri of Koumasi and Accra with their millions of people and bumper to bumper traffic has exhaust fumes mixed in

The potpourri of villages with mud huts and children running around without shoes smells of cooking fires

If I could capture the smell, then maybe I wouldn’t forget

And sometimes I’m afraid, just weeks after being there, that in the smell of America  I’m already forgetting the smell of that place across the Atlantic where I left a piece of my heart

I brought home a carved wooden spoon from Ghana

And it used to smell like Ghana, and when I would forget, I could sniff the wood that grew there

Now it just smells like my house

And maybe when I got home and showered off the red Ghanaian dust,

I stopped smelling like Ghana too

Now I just smell like my house

Now I just smell like America

And that scares me a little bit

 

Still following,

Elizabeth