Most of you know....

that I have quite the sniffer. I can smell someone in the room before I see him/her. And Angie's recent posting about not being able to preserve smells got me to thinking that while you can't actively preserve smells, you can be walking along and suddenly a smell takes you back to some moment in time that you weren't actively thinking about 3 seconds before. For example, I was in the stairwell at work and I smelled something that I couldn't immediately place but then realized that it was the smell of the building where I had pre-school. That and the smell of tempera paint. Or, one of the admins at my office wears W!ld Musk by C@ty and that's the smell of my mom from 1984-2000. You know, you walk into the copy room and suddenly you smell your mom and you remember sitting on your parents' bed watching her get dressed and put on make up and thinking that someday you will have a big girl job and will have to wear make up and high heels to work.

I wish we could preserve smells in an album of sorts. Like scratch and sniff photographs or something. Like the smell of your prom date (before he gots sweaty from dancing around like an idiot), the smell in the Gaul house family room on a Saturday night (a mix of taco dip, chlorine and ashes from the fireplace), and the smell of my dog after she's been bathed and fully dry (otherwise she just smells like wet dog). I bet there's a lot of money to be made in scratch and sniff technology. Maybe that's what I'll do after I retire to the spinster lodge in VT.......in between working on the maple tree farm and quilting.......