The Smell of Winter Waning

It didn’t freeze last night. It’s a wonderful thing to walk outside with the dog in the morning, and be greeted by moist 35 degree air.

And…

Something else in the air this morning. A smell come tickling my nose across the bare patches of ground peeking through crusted snow.

The promise of Spring on the horizon, of Winter waning.

Like most smells, this one didn’t hit me in the face and scream its name. Instead, it was a subtle little “scent image” deep in my brain – one that made my eyes snap open and look around for the thing that was different.

The world around us is saturated with the smells of life, but the fact that we don’t pay attention has let most of the scent neural pathways in our brain atrophy. Our nose picks the smells up, and sends the message to our brain, but our brain figured out a long time ago that we don’t really care about all those smells, so it used the neural pathways for something else.

But the smells are still there, and the message is still being sent to the brain.

Now and then, when it’s quiet, and my mind’s washed pretty clean, the brain recognizes a little hint of message that the nose is sending, and pays just a little bit of attention.

This morning, that little hint felt a lot like winter starting to lose it’s grip on the world around me.

Author: Neil Hanson

Neil administers this site and manages content. View all posts by Neil Hanson