DAY ONE.  Welcome to the first day in a series, during this month of LOVE, to explore and access the loves in your life.  Grab a pen and paper to make your own Love Notes and keep them safe—because you will want them on those days when love seems to be hiding out—you will know where to go—to find it again.

Love The One You’re With—-What Do You Love To Smell?

The five senses and love are inextricably tied to one another.  As a matter of fact, volumes of research have proven that the olfactory nerve, also known, quite scientifically,  as our “sniffer” is the most powerful of all our senses. 

 From the get-go, our sense of smell, even at birth, bonds us most deeply with our mothers and fathers.  Our ability to smell creates a direct pathway into the brain, bypassing all rational receptors, and heads straight for our limbic systems where every emotional moment in our lives is stored.  We are literally, tuned in and turned on by our sense of smell.  A certain smell can take us to our grandmother’s front porch where we churned the homemade ice cream for the fresh peach pie she was baking.  Or, the smell of incense can remind us of the day of our communion when we were at the altar of the church, so nervous, we had rotten socks in our stomachs and our hands were sweating. We can recall every detail of those moments from just a whiff of something similar—-20, 30, 40 years later.

Perfumers count on us to spend billions of dollars each year to anchor our lives in the smells we love on our own skin and on the ones we are attracted to.  No question, if the movies or TV could create “Smell-O-Vision”, they would have figured out a way all ready.

So, we can let love into our lives in an instant by creating some of the same smells that take us to places within ourselves that bring up love and safety and joy.  I’ll share a few of my own examples to help you get the ball rolling:

1.  I love the smell of roses.  That smell parks me in a time when I was six, or so, somewhere between kindergarten and first grade.  There was a rose garden in our neighborhood, lovingly tended by a lady whose name I don’t even remember.  What I do vividly remember is walking to and from school, where I took extra time to stick my nose in every rose, smelling each one as far as my lungs would take me.   As I write this, a reflexive smile revists that memory with me.   Those rose garden moments anchored other indelible life budding lessons as well.

Seeing my neighbor, doing her daily “clucking”, consistently creating a concert with nature, as she turned the dirt and pruned and watered her “children”, each bush with its own name, she made evident, the stunning results of discipline and devotion.  As she explained what she was doing,  love was blooming in her words and in the smile on her face.  Even at that young age, I remember thinking about how  neat it would be when I “was old someday” to be sure to have something I loved to do as much as she did.   The fascination of nature at work, held me in its grip as I focused on a particular bud on Monday morning—-then I watched that same bud every day, as it slowly and seemlessly unfolded into another intricate masterpiece, a full blown rose….waitng there to pleasure a curious, carefree kid.

SEEK THE SMELL and all will be well.

Now, I buy roses, usually at the grocery store.  For some reason, they don’t have that heavenly smell any more.  I think the breeders are going for quantity—and in a funny irony—the florist told me that many commercial roses have been bred not to have thorns—when the thorns went away, so did the smell.  But, that’s another discussion for another day.  The point is, I still search out that smell.  And, I have found it in certain candles and lotions and perfumes using just the right amount of essential oil, taking me back to the garden I loved so much. 

Hint:  If you are lover of the smell of roses—- Try any Jo Malone products—the perfect rose smell.  Fabulous candles. And for body products, lotions, and creams a new line called Nourishing Rose, RENEW, by Aromatherapy Associates is wonderful, too.

2.  Clothes, just out of the dryer.  That’s an easy one to duplicate.  To me, it smells like freshness and order, innocence and safety.  No big stories to attach that feeling to—just a gut reaction to laundry! Sometimes, I grab the entire load of warm things, still balled into tangled wads right out of the dryer and just throw the whole kit and caboodle on the bed—-then I dive, face first, right into the pile. Warm and soft.  My nose is leaping for joy—if it could clap—this one would be a standing ovation moment. 

3.  The smell of Snickerdoodles, baking in the oven, when I walk in the door.  For me, there is nothing like  the transition from the world “out there” to the “Welcome Home” of coming through the door to the smell of soup cooking on the stove or cookies, baking in the oven.  Creating that scenario, if you live alone, or if you are usually the one in the kitchen, cooking the food, can be tricky. It’s not often that your nose gets that loving jolt of contrast.  But, my oven has one of those pre-set timers on it—so I can put the dough in the oven—and set it to turn on an hour later.  If the cookies take 10 minutes to bake, then I can go for an hour walk and head toward home just in time to enter the house, now overpowered with the aroma of vanilla, butter and cinnamon–while rescuing the cookies for later.  My walk is filled with the  anticipation of my own “Welcome Home” knowing that, in mere minutes, I will be enveloped with a snoot-full of love.

What smells like ‘love’ to you?