The Scent of Thanksgiving
Finding gratitude when we’re apart this holiday season
The citrus-celery tang of stuffing as my mother whips in the eggs.
How, soon after that stuffing slides into the oven, the kitchen fills with the steam of its bread crumbs baking all over again.
Pumpkin pie warming alongside mashed potatoes. Clouds of sweetness and cinnamon swirling with the scent of turkey breast. Nutmeg. Gingerbread.
There are crisp, green-tinged fragrances to slice through all of that warm goo, too. Tart apples; pine needles, and sap. Cold gusts of snow-air from a thousand feet up in the sky that whistle straight in through the front door when someone comes home, carrying a whoosh of sparkle.
Peppermint, sharp and clean, when a candy cane snaps in two between a loved one’s teeth.
Sticky, chocolate-flavored kisses after everyone’s gotten into the candy.
Of all our bodily senses, smell is the one most closely associated with emotion and memory. This is true not just in our intuition, but in the anatomy of our neural pathways.
Vision, hearing, touch: these senses travel through bio-wires that run to the cognitive parts of brain, giving us raw data to interpret. They are, comparatively speaking, practical.
