Sniff, Sniff...

...



Smells to my mind, are the sense most capable of evoking memories. You know what I mean. You walk into a room, and a smell triggers a flood of emotions connected with your grandmother.

Strangely, people lose the ability to smell the odors they live with all the time. The person with seven cats barely notices the littler box, because their brain gets tired of the constant nagging input from the olfactory nerves, and actually stops "listening to" (or smelling) those messages. This neurological phenomenon can be dangerous to people who work around hazardous chemicals, because they actually lose the ability to smell the toxins.

I've not been sleeping well, lately. I'm under a lot of pressure. And both Robb and the cat snore like crazy. The cat wraps herself around my head like a furry hat, and then snores and snores.

Also, Robb wears a hair pomade that totally freaks me out. It smells like the hospital, and each time I get a whiff of that scent, it brings me back to the terror and anxiety and unknowingness of those first months after Robb broke his back. I hate this smell, but I don't think Robb understands the intensity of my dislike. It's not that the smell is necessarily "bad." It is that the emotions and associations that the smell evokes are unbelievably upsetting.

But what's a girl to do, when she's laying in bed, irrationally stressed out by the smell of hair-styling products? While I'm quite likely to roll Robb around the bed in an attempt to curtail snoring, I'm not going to make him get up in the middle of the night and demand that he wash his hair.