Powerful Smell

I have always been intrigued by the power of smell. It may be our most primordial sense. Suck in some chemicals past your upper nasal cavity -- your smell receptors are basically a part of your brain. Smell is one of the earliest senses to develop, with taste and touch of course. Seemingly simple smells have an amazing ability to stir deep memories.

In my writing, I find that smells trigger flashbacks in my characters as they do to myself. One such memory is triggered by the smell of picked-ripe strawberries, the ones that are red all the way through. Not the storebought ones, mind you, with their white cores. That smell makes me think of OJ Simpson and his mad bronco ride up the California interstate.

I was driving back with a few work buddies from Carmel by the Sea to San Jose, CA, where I worked at the time. I think it was a Friday in June, 1994, but I suppose I could check the date easy enough (you can guess why, I suppose). We were coming back from dinner at the Boar's Breath (Head?) Inn, the one owned by Clint Eastwood.

Seeing fruit stands along the side of the road, we pulled off to buy some freshly picked strawberries. Pints were selling for $1 each by an eighty year old migrant worker. Well, he was probably 30 something, but he looked like no one from that tv show. He was skin was so pigmented from endless hours in the sun that the dark coastal soil dusting his skin looked light brown, almost white. He had a permanent stoop to his posture, one that could only come from tireless hours in the berry fields. That, more than his heavily sun ravaged skin, is what put the years on his appearance.

I could see that he had a lot of strawberries; the rancher at that farm, he said, lets them pick and sell the very ripe ones, the ones too ripe to make it to the store. So, I bought a pallet of them. Yes - a pallet. He tried to give me a pallet discount, but I would have none of that.

As I handed the strawberries out into the car and slid into the drivers seat, one of my friends said that on the radio OJ was making a break for it in a white bronco and the police were in pursuit. So, as we drove up the road, we laughed and talked about how we might should pull over and see if he would make it all the way up to us. We ate strawberries. Vine ripe, melt in your mouth strawberries that I had never known could be that delicious. Well, sensuous as much as delicious. That pallet of strawberries, in the evening sun, filled the cabin of that car with smell that to this day still triggers that memory of OJ Simpson. And of the man that picked them.

New Blog

Here it is, my new blog. Nothing profound here -- hopefully just a spot to work on my writing and maybe yours too.