Flashbacks

They say that olfaction is the sense that has the largest and broadest amount of information attached to a single stimuli. I have often thought about that... how one simple smell can flood your mind with impressions, emotions, and thoughts.

Yesterday I was driving through the countryside between jobs and enjoying the turning colors of the Minnesota forests in fall. The roads wound between lakes, around sloughs, fields and hills. It is beautiful.

Then I caught the faint smell of burning leaves... it was totally unexpected and shocked my senses. Given the air quality laws, it's something you almost never smell these days.

...but in Ukraine it is virtually the smell of fall and spring.

One wiff, and I was slammed with a deep emotional reaction and a flood of thoughts, memories, impressions, associations, and a kind of pain.

Maybe I was still in that state of mind, but when we sang "Blessed be Your Name" in Church this morning, ...the words just wouldn't come out of my mouth. That song was used in a video about our team in Ukraine. The first time I saw that video was the first time I ever heard the song in English. I had learned it in Russian. So, I still "see" the images from that video when I hear the song.

So then it was very strange as I sat here in my office this afternoon studying, and heard the unmistakable sound of a carpet being whacked with a stick. It's a sound like nothing else, and the dull reverberation of the "thwack" off the neighbors houses made the sound palate complete. Too real. It's something you virtually never hear in America, but is so common in Ukraine it wouldn't even be noticed. Again, a similar flood of thoughts.

I looked out the window to see that Gretchen had taken the doormat from the front doorstep and had laid it over a chair in the front yard and was whacking it with a broom handle. It instantly flashed in my mind that that is just what she might be doing if living in Ukraine.

What a strange day. Some days I struggle. This is one of them.