the Smell of Home

If I close my eyes, I can recall the smell of every home I've ever lived in. Our noisy apartment on the Rue Chartran smelled like fresh carpeting and old dog at the same time. Rue du General Cordonnier, that wonderful house with its magical secret garden tucked away behind the tall wall, smelled like rhododendrons and geraniums. Our apartment in New York smelled like the warmth of prewar heat in old, clanging radiators.

This house never felt like home to me. The smell of new construction was always present, always overpowering the delicate chemistry of our family aroma, a simple cocktail of warm pancakes and freshly shampooed wet hair. On Monday, strangers wearing work boots brought in moving boxes. They sprinkled them throughout the house, left them leaning on walls, overpowering this house's perfume with the smell of cardboard and packing tape.

The moving smell brings to mind chaos, disruption, and tearful goodbyes, but there's good mixed in too. It's also the smell of adventure and fresh starts. It promises new favorite restaurants, new traditions, new friends, new jokes, and new memories.

Next week the boxes will be set down near walls begging to be baptized with pastel colors in a house with a different smell. The boxes will alter that house's chemistry, and slowly will recede, leaving behind what will soon become familiar, what will become the smell of home.

Happy Wordful, not so Wordless and Way-back wednesday!