Smells like…

As some of you may know, my MA thesis had a lot to do with senses, especially the sense of smell, its cooperation with memory and its presence in text as a shorthand for many other things. I love my MA – I loved writing and researching it and still look out for sources about the issue. It’s one that I find organically interesting, but experiencing what I wrote about was not something I could force. It just happens – like last Saturday, when we left the house on a bright, mild Welsh morning and I got a lungful of the freshest, tenderest air, smelling of wet soil drying in the sun, uncurling leaves and the sea. It was like a soft punch in the chest – for a second I was back in York, in May, during that glorious spring, that beginning. It was a smell I hadn’t felt since that May almost seven years ago, but when I did, last Saturday, I was certain it’s the same scent. It was so visceral. Sounds trite, and yet that trip back to seven years ago wasn’t. Someone wiser than me speaks about it more eloquently here.