Smells of the Sabbath

We've already established that I have a hyper sensitive nose, no? So, here's where my nose becomes more of a curse than a blessing.

Sunday is a lovely day to get out the crock pot and simmer a delicious dinner while you're at church so that by the time you get home it's warm and bubbly and fills your home with the perfume of lunch/dinner. At least, that's what I've heard.

By the time we get home from our church services each Sunday at noon, we are hungry for lunch. When I say "hungry" I really mean "so famished I can't see straight" and when I say "we" I really mean "me." So when it's cold outside and rain is blowing at your face no matter which direction you're holding the umbrella as you walk home, and the wind is so forceful that it pushes you backward, that's when you want to come home to a warm, nice-smelling apartment.

But instead, we are often bombarded by our neighbors' malodorous crock pot creations. With my sharpened sense of smell, I'm able to sniff out nearly every ingredient. By the time the scent of their lovely, thoughtfully prepared meals wafts its way out of their apartment, into the hallway, mixes with the emanations from other apartments, seeps under my door into my sanctuary of fragrance and beauty, and reaches my nose, it's ... how do I put it nicely? ... it smells like the stagnant air from a tavern the hot day after a long St. Patrick's Day night combined with the scents of a sun-drenched dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant ... funky.

So these Smells of the Sabbath (term is trademarked by TC as a gesture of sympathy for my aromatic complications) typify our Sunday afternoons. It's a bouquet of chocolate cake pork roast baked potato brownies slathered in mint frosting clam chowder overripe bananas beef stew with a side order of steamed garlic bread covered in jam and bread-n-butter pickles, and can only be stifled by stuffing a blanket into the crack between the door and the floor and generously spraying Glade around the room.

The secret life of super sniffers is neither seductive nor glamorous. But such is my life.