If You’re Fond of Sand Dunes and Salty Air…

By -

    My grandmother has lived in Cape Cod (first seasonally then permanently) since she was a teenager in the 1950’s. Her house, which was built by her father, is within walking distance of a stretch of beach. Over the years my family have visited her and my grandfather, usually during the summer, so I have been lucky enough to experience the beauty and richness of the environment during the peak of the season.

   The amount of smells floating around on a hot July day in Cape Cod can be quite overwhelming. If I were to close my eyes and image I had stepped onto her front yard, some things that come to are (but not limited to): hydrangea bushes; the faint scent of pine trees; sunscreen; a dry mix of sand and stone from the dirt road that forms yellow clouds mingled with the moist salty air wafting up from the ocean. These scents have a comforting and nostalgic effect on me, one that has been shared for thousands of years by secular and non-secular people alike. In the context of one midrashim, Songs 2:2, “The act of inhaling (heriah) the fragrance of the flower causes the king to feel a sense of calm and restfulness (shavath nafsho). As a result of this pleasant experience, the king ceases the destruction of the orchard and announces that he is sparing the entire orchard because of this one flower” (Green 125). Whether its a connection with a place, a memory, or a god, smell creates a link between the physical and ethereal.

    Down on the beach, the air becomes so salty you can taste it. The baking sand, piles of seaweed, and tall, dry grasses that slice your fingers if you rub them the wrong way all to me create a place that feels sacred. Who knows, maybe the spray from the crashing waves is actually God saying hello, as "scent is the breath of the Divine" (Green, 162).




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Naming Scents: The Ambiguous Nature of Describing Smell

By Samantha K -
Image
It is really difficult to name smells without just saying the thing that produces a smell. We don’t really have words for smells specifically. A floral scent is called that because it smells like flowers, “floral” is not its own word specifically for the scent. This becomes especially apparent when reading the names of candles and perfumes. For example, I own a perfume named “Velvet Moon”. That name has nothing to do with what it smells like, and yet I personally think it is aptly named. The perfume smells like cardamom, mahogany, beeswax, and black pepper. Is that what the moon or velvet smells like? Almost certainly not. But the words used to describe the scent have given me the association between those scents, velvet, and the moon. This is also true when the name of a scent doesn’t match what mid tells you something should smell like. There is a Yankee candle called “By the Pool” that is amber and coconut scented. That notably is not what pools smell like, so while the scent itself...
Read more

Memorable Moments: time and place

By Josephine Mortrud -
Taste presentation  Memorable Moments: time and place Dear REL-365-B01-2025, I had the privilege of taking SMells and Bells in the second semester of my senior year. JBK and I planned for me to take this course one year prior while planning out my religion minor. It was a really long year but I am so glad I got to take this course when I did. Class meetings for this course were some of the more challenging and more calming for me throughout the semester. Some days I anxiously sat out of conversations while scrolling through apartment websites and wondering if I needed to look for another job. Other days we made s’mores, celebrated the trees’ New Year, and went on a walk in the Wheaton Woods.  New Years for the trees Pilgrimage to the Bra Tree As always I deeply appreciated hearing from my peers especially when we disagree. I am honored to be seen as a safe person to disagree with. I am thankful for anyone who shared especially in particularly small and vulnerable classes like ...
Read more

Justice

By -
Image
We know the five major senses- touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing- and we know that there are many senses beyond those ones we tend to limit ourselves to- like your sense of pain or temperature. But how many other senses are there?  Which one is our sixth sense? In The Deepest Sense , I was most fascinated by the chapter on animals. Because they had a good example for what I believe is the sixth sense that ties society together. That is, one's sense of justice. Justice is something that you perceive, and it is something that is perceived by the rest of nature, or at least our closer relatives in the animal kingdom. In that experiment, one of the monkeys was upset by the injustice of the other monkey getting better treatment. This is the cornerstone of every great society- the distributing proper treatment of people and the earth. When there is great inequality, people rise up, because they sense that justice has failed them. Sure, sensing ghosts is probably the most wel...
Read more