Nelson Mandala describes his childhood in his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom. His feelings of being a young boy growing up in a South African village seemed familiar, lyrical and universal.
I often think of ways in which we connect with one another - often by realizing how much we have in common. I wonder if others can connect with how I feel connected to people across time and space by things as simple as distinctive smells.
I now know that by the time I was ready to go off to college, the summer I turned 18 years old, I was connected to three smells that would for the rest of my life evoke sweet memories.
I cannot catch the whiff of honeysuckle without being transported to the brick house on Short Street, in Avella, Pennsylvania, where my Aunt lived with my Grandfather. We would go there every year to stay and play with the cousins who lived across the street, across the railroad tracks that cut all the way through this little town lengthwise and across another quiet street. At night the fireflies would come out, and we would chase them and catch them; we did it barefoot holding glass bottles that eventually would be so full of the blinking insects that the jars would be lit up like lanterns. My mother was close to her father, loved and admired him in equal measure, and, perhaps because she was the oldest of five, showed a reverence and commitment to family that, when combined with my father's abiding devotion to family and relatives has permeated the lives of the next two generations, at least. While my Mother last lived in Avella in 1948, when she talked about home, we all knew where she meant. We used to draw the stamen from the honey suckle flower and taste the sweetness as the sun set on long summer nights, the adults sat on the porch quietly talking and rocking, and we waited for trains to whistle and rumble by so that we could count the cars. Honeysuckle grew with abandon on both sides of the porch steps. Even now, the fragrance of honeysuckle is magic, a flying carpet that takes me to a place called childhood.
The second smell that endures for me is the smell of wild blueberries growing in Coffee Hollow just a short ways down Mink Farm Road from Catoctin Quaker Camp. This is where Mimi Ligon, my co-counselor, and I would go with our campers after dinner and chores and the evening activity to sleep under stars. There were tons of shooting stars too. I would doze off until someone would scream out "did you see that one?" at which point I would feel around for my glasses and look up at what is infinite. We wouldn't pack much, didn't need much. We were 17 years old and had 12 children in our care that would have been in Middle School had that term been invented at the time. We would wake up with the sun, a bit chilled in the mountain air, and pick blueberries that would go immediately into the pancake batter and into the frying pan on the camp fire.
The third smell is in the Sandy Spring Meeting House. I used to think it was unique, but I've now been to other Meeting Houses and sometimes I recognize a similar smell there too. I think the smell comes from very old buildings with slightly musty carpets and centuries of seekers sitting expectantly, quietly, impatiently, blankly, indomitably, joyfully, sadly, contently. I didn't know that I loved the smell until I was in college and it was no longer nearby. When I came home but didn't stay over a Sunday, it didn’t feel like I had really been home completely. When we knew we were going to miss Meeting, we would randomly go by and sit on the Meeting House porch for a while. If the doors were unlocked, we would go inside. If it was night, we would (carefully) light a candle. And we would take deep breaths, filling our lungs, seeking unity with the folks who had been there before us.