Just Give Me a Little Piece of Quiet by Lorilee Craker

Author:Lorilee Craker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.

Hebrews 6:15

28: what’s that smell?

Let my prayer be counted as incense before thee, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.

Psalm 141:2 (RSV)

My husband thinks I have turbo-charged olfactory glands. It never fails to boggle his mind how I can smell things before he can—if he ever does! “What’s that smell?” I’ll ask suspiciously, sniffing the air for more scented evidence.

“What smell? What are you talking about?” he’ll say, looking at me like I’m a bit loopy.

“I think it’s the baby,” I’ll say, sighing with the knowledge that this means someone is getting up to deal with a diaper detonation.

“No way! I just changed him, what? Like five minutes ago!” My husband will look shocked and filled with indignation that our son could unload in his pants so soon after being swabbed and changed. “Still, I don’t smell anything. I think you’re imagining things.”

But you know how babies are. They aren’t at all concerned with the timing of their bodily extrusions. And usually, when Mom thinks something may be rotten in Denmark, she’s right. We parents need keen senses of smell to detect various things that need immediate detecting. Like a dirty diaper, of course, or spit-up (it’s good to get that out of your hair before you leave the house in the morning), or maybe a pet’s accident. No one wants to be surprised with a shoe full of that!

Thankfully, there’s a flip side for my sharp sense of smell. We have so many fabulous aromas to enjoy on this earth. Fresh roasted Costa Rican coffee. Artisanal bread baking. Peonies in June.

And experts say smell can stir our memories like no other sense. When I was a college student in downtown Chicago, there was a chocolate factory near the campus, and once in a while the aroma of chocolate would waft around me, tantalizing, torturing, until I couldn’t stand another second without a bag of M&M’s. Now the perfume of melting chocolate takes me back to college every single time.

Doyle’s parents recently remodeled their farmhouse, which is a positive thing in every aspect except for one detail: the new construction mandated that they tear down the breezeway to the house. I loved to walk into that house and linger in the breezeway for a few extra seconds just so I could inhale the beloved, never-forgotten smell of my grandma’s entranceway. Grandma’s house was also situated on a farm, though hers was set on hundreds of acres of wheat and canola and flax, and Doyle’s parents’ place is nestled in forty acres of woods and hay fields.

Both country abodes shared a similar scent. The fragrance, almost indefinable as many aromas are, was a bouquet of old wood, loamy earth, apples, and melted snow. It wasn’t necessarily a pleasurable smell, like something a candle maker would infuse into hand-dipped wax. If the smell were in a candle, it would probably be named something like “Fruit Cellar/Old Barn/Muddy Boots,” nothing most folks would care to burn in their homes.

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