Saved by the smell

So far, the year 2025 has been about as enjoyable as a soggy Vegemite-and-onion sandwich. It stinks, has stunk, and there’s more stinkiness in the forecast.

Not that I’ve inhaled all the stinkiness that 2025 has had to offer … so far. I can’t inhale it all because my sinuses are clogged with about half of Georgia’s record-setting pollen. Spring never bothered me before, but this year it’s making up for giving me a half-century pass on allergies. Apparently, Trump’s not the only one on a vengeance tour — so is Mother Nature.

I know that I need to stop and smell the roses, so to speak, but the roses are probably drenched in pollen, too. Fortunately, I got a whiff of something this past weekend that lifted my spirits for a moment — a scent that whisked me off to another time and another place.

My 2-year-old granddaughter Hazel Grace likes to dig through our giant plastic container of crayons. There must be a couple of hundred crayons in there. When I was in school, anyone who had 64 crayons in a box with a sharpener was what we called “rich.” Compared to that kid I once was, I guess I’m super-mega-wealthy-rich now. I just invest in valuable commodities like crayons and Margaritaville t-shirts instead of buying elections and politicians like a normal rich person in this country.

Hazel doesn’t actually color with these crayons. Instead, she holds them up, and we work on colors. And we use terms like “blue,” “orange,” “brown” and “green” even if it’s really “cerulean,” “atomic tangerine,” “fuzzy wuzzy” and “inchworm.” I don’t want to confuse her with so many named shades, nor do I feel rich enough to use such uppity terms for a crayon.

She also likes to smell the crayons. So, I did the same as I sat with her. I grabbed a whole handful and inhaled. I didn’t smell “cool mint,” “atomic tangerine,” “jazzberry jam” or “laser lemon.” Nope, all I smelled was paraffin wax … and 1975.

Now, there were a lot of smells from 1975 that I was OK never smelling again — hotel rooms that reeked of cigarettes, the exterminating poison from the mosquito truck that prowled our town and my newborn baby sister to name a few. But it was pretty cool going back to Miss Hunt’s kindergarten classroom for a moment.

Some smells will take me right back to those old school buildings. Granted, some of those smells — such as the seventh-grade boys locker room … or any boys locker room — aren’t worthy of discussion. But others are.

The smell of chalk dust takes me back to the days of dusting erasers in Mrs. Haugabook’s third grade classroom. The smell of a pencil eraser takes me back to all those years of boring standardized tests. The smell of formaldehyde takes me back to sophomore biology class and half of my school lunches.

Unfortunately, I never come across the best smell from school — mimeograph papers. I remember Ms. Jones handing those out while they were still warm and telling us, “Take one and pass the rest back to the other students in your row. And quit sniffing them!”

Yeah, right. I just felt sorry for the kids in the very back who were left with cooled mimeograph sheets and thousands of germs from the noses of curious classmates.

Granted, all of those smells — including the skeeter truck — probably give you some form of cancer, but sometimes you’ve just got to weigh the risks against the rewards. And any smell that takes me out of the here and now in 2025.

There are other drugs that might also take you out of 2025, but they’re either costly, deadly or illegal. You can safely snort crayons without having to slink down some dark alley and asking a shady guy if he knows where you can score some “fuzzy wuzzy” or “atomic tangerine.”

I’ll likely still have our same box of crayons 20 years from now — broken and worn down by then (both me and the crayons). And I’ll likely still be grabbing a handful to snort for a quick trip into the past — either to Miss Hunt’s kindergarten class or perhaps to a playroom in 2025 with a certain little 2-year-old simply learning her colors.