I find it interesting the things I smell throughout my day. Especially when I am out walking and there is nothing really on my mind and a smell catches my attention. Have you ever noticed those smells around you throughout the day? I find most of them pleasant, and some of them not so pleasant. Every now and then one slight odor or another brings me back to a time in the past I may not have thought about in many years. Skunk for instance, I find pleasant because of happy childhood memories the scent invokes.
Today, the first scent I noticed were coming from some hyacinths that are in bloom right now. As I walked along, the scent of apple blossoms came on the slight breeze. Next was the smell of laundry detergent and a too popular dryer sheet odor. It was from a man tinkering with his pickup truck. A while further around the blocks, and I caught the scent of cooking, not sure what it was, but someone knows how to cook!
Once I reach the park, there are people smells. The scent of young girl’s who walk along the walking path and do not quite know the correct amount of perfume to put on. To many of them buy scented everything and then put perfume on too..yuk! The women on the other hand smell much better unless they use Tide and Bounce…. Women over the age of thirty seem to develop smells that are unique to themselves. I do not know if this in intentional or not. Some older women smell like insecticide…not sure what that is about.
When the kids go by with their parents, they usually smell like the last junk food they ate. I think for children the smell of junk food is more important than the taste of junk food. So the kids go by smelling of strawberries, cherry, grape, chocolate, or other common snack foods they should not eat so much of.
Which brings me to the sounds that I hear to go along with the various scents and odors. Generally I listen to the birds, but that is interrupted at times from fifteen or twenty feet away from people and their portable music players. I usually do not mind what they are listening too, but they always have ear buds on, and I wonder if they know they are partially deaf. It is too bad that their spouses and babies have made or will make sighs and other sounds and they will not hear them. I wonder if they can even hear all the birds singing and the kids laughing?
Now that the weather is warming up, I also hear the rustle of the lizards in the shrubbery as they scurry along looking for bugs. Being in a desert environment there are lots of lizards. The ground squirrels are out with their babies, and where the rocks line part of the arroyos, they have their babies out learning about their world. They make some squeaking type noises, and also rustle the shrubbery. There are also rabbits doing the same thing, but I never hear them make any noise. Finally there are the ducks. They are normally quiet, but when they are in the reeds of the pond they like to fly into, the reeds make noise as they try to hide better.
My sister has a theory about the birds and their songs I think is worth sharing, for discussion if nothing else. She studies and watches nature a lot, reading books, comparing, and thinking about animals. She told me one day that she thinks that the songs of birds were given to birds by God. God she says wanted a way to keep the animals and we humans calm during our lifetime, so God created bird songs that acts like an umbrella of calmness around the earth. Anything living on the earth is subject to the calming influence of this global network of bird songs. Whether this thinking has any basis in fact is an area I doubt any research has been done, but I do enjoy listening to the birds singing their songs as I walk.
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