Count Your Blessings #127 – The Swell of Sweet Peas in the Kitchen

This evening after I had finished work I went downstairs and noticed that it had stopped raining. I like to breathe in the fresh air after rain so I went out into the garden armed with a pair of scissors.

One of the things that we grow in our garden nearly every year are sweet peas. I don’t really grow them for their looks, I grow them for their scent, their looks are a bonus. Because of this years strange weather they have taken a bit to get going so this was only the second bunch I had cut.

Armed with my catch I came back into the kitchen picking up a vase in the utility room I placed them on the window ledge, stopping along the way to let Sue have a smell. They were lovely.

Just now I walked back into the kitchen and the whole room is filled with their fragrance.

Something about sweet peas means that they belong in the kitchen or in the dining room, I’m not sure why, but that’s where I always put them.

There’s a saying that goes around that smell is the thing that helps us remember the most:

Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.  Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.  Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

The smell of a certain sun-cream reminds me of holidays in Florida. It was very hot and we used loads of it.

The sent of a certain shampoo brand reminds me of cruising in the Bahamas. We had to shower every day before going to the grand dining hall for Dinner.

Johnson’s Baby Oil reminds me of bath time with my children when they were younger.

The odour of soil reminds me of days digging at the family allotment as a child.

The smell of incense takes me to a friends wedding where so much of was used that I felt ill, if I remember correctly Sue was pregnant at the time and really struggled.

Conversely, the thought of Bovril brings a rather unpleasant taste to my mouth because someone once left a cup in an open plan office while they were off work. It started to ferment and it took days to find where the terrible smell had come from. We still had to work.

The Bible tells of an occasion not long before Jesus when Mary took an expensive jar of perfume and anointed Jesus with it.

Then Mary took a twelve-ounce jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard, and she anointed Jesus’ feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance.

John 12

Nard was used as a burial incense – without knowing it Mary was signaling that the time for Jesus death was coming close.

I wonder what thought came to those who were present on that day, in that room full of fragrance,  years later when they smelled that sent again.