Welcome back, WQWers
I hope you all who celebrate it had a great Mother’s Day and are enjoying great weather. Vince and I enjoyed a trip to California to visit his son and girlfriend and several close friends. It’s good to be back home again with all of you.
I Smell Something Fishy Here
Today’s title, “What’s that smell?” comes from Vince’s response when he opened the refrigerator door when we got back. I wasn’t going to use it, but Terri Webster Schrandt and I had a good laugh about it, so there it is.
“I think about how smells are personal. Not only can a smell trigger memories, each of us can smell something different from the same object as each of our brains interpret those smells differently.” Beach Walk Reflections
IT’S EASY TO PLAY ALONG WITH #WQW
This weekly writing challenge runs from Wednesday through Tuesday. The only rule is to use a quote. If you want to participate, create a pingback to link your post. Not sure how to do that? See how to create pingbacks here. Be sure to link to this post, not my page.
Featured Bloggers for “Which is Which Hope or Faith?
Your friendships mean so much. Thank you all for joining in.
- INKDROP
- KEEP IT ALIVE
- LADY LEE MANILA
- LADY LEE MANILA ON VACATIONS
- LADY LEE MANILA ON MOTHER’S DAY
- LOVING LIFE
- LOVING LIFE MOTHER’S DAY THOUGHTS
- NEW2WRITING WRITE PHOTO CHALLENGE
- RAMBLINGS OF A RARING WRITER
- SECOND WIND LEISURE SUNDAY STILLS
#WQW # – Topic: Sense of Smell
Definition smell: (Oxford Language Dictionary)
- the faculty or power of perceiving odors or scents by means of the organs in the nose.
- perceive or detect the odor or scent of (something).
- emit an odor or scent of a specified kind.
The Underrated Sense – Smell
Many of you have had COVID or know someone who has. The most unique symptoms were the loss of the senses of taste and smell. That unique characteristic separated COVID from all other flues, and even if you felt just a little off, you knew…
So how did that feel? Does a person still have allergies if they can’t smell? What did you miss most about not being able to smell? Did anyone think, “Oh well, at least it wasn’t my eyes that didn’t work.?”
Writers have many uses for the sense of smell. Here are three but you may have others.
- Metaphors: “You can dress up greed, but you can’t stop the stench.” ― Craig D. Lounsbrough
- Similes: “The despair of solitary confinement settled over him like the smell of rot.” Charli Mills from May Story Chat “As Far As a Former Prisoner Can Go”
- Reviving Memories: “Poignant memories. Oranges were our rarity in the 1940s. I always ate the peel because I didn’t know when I would get another” Derrick Knight
- Evoking Fear: “But a smell shivered him awake. It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. ― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path
For More Ideas about the Sense of Smell
- BEACH WALK REFLECTIONS
- INK DROPS (poem)
- KEEP IT ALIVE
- LADY LEE MANILA
- LOVING LIFE
- NEW 2 WRITING
- SECOND WIND LEISURE ( SUNDAY STILLS)
- JOURNEYS WITH JOHNBO – (amazing story in the comment section of WQW #17
Other Challenges that Inspired WQW # 17
- CEE’S FOTD (Flower of the Day)
- CELL PIC SUNDAY
- CFFC– (Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge) straight lines
- SUNDAY STILLS Aqua and Teal
- WATER WATER EVERYWHERE
My Choices for This Week
Dogs possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in ours. And the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is about 40 times greater than ours.
Phoenix Veterinary Center
Some things you might miss if you had no sense of smell
- A lilac bush blooming in your garden
- Oranges or orange blossoms in the spring
- A sizzling steak
- Cake or bread right out of the oven
- Salty ocean breeze
- The 1960s morning smell of Old Spice after your grandfather shaved
Good Smells
Yes, aqua/teal/turquoise is my favorite color. How lucky was I that Terri chose that theme for Sunday Stills? No, I didn’t pressure her!
Bad Smells
Some things you might not miss if you lost your sense of smell.
“The sense of smell transports me across Time on the wind like a feather that gently falls until it catapults laterally through a memory before drifting out of sight.” SNAPSHOTS IN CURSIVE
- a pungent mess made by a cat, dog, baby, or another family member.
- Overpowering perfume in an elevator, doctor’s office, car, or train
- A skunk anywhere
- Opening the door of a refrigerator that needs cleaning
- Three-day old sweat
- Oranges that have been hidden under a child’s bed for weeks
- Nail polish and polish remover or worse yet the application of new acrylic nails
- The strong aroma of coal and oil burning in the firebox of a working steam locomotive.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge subject of straight lines is one of my favorite and fits this smelly challenge amazingly well.
Things that might not smell at all
- Electric versus steam engine trains Pennsylvania Railroad 4935 is a preserved electric locomotive. It is one of sixteen remaining Pennsylvania Railroad class GG1 locomotives, and one of two at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. Wikipedia
“Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
UPDATES ON ALWAYS WRITE
- May Story Chat: “As Far As a Former Prisoner Can Go” by Charli Mills
- PPAC on Friday
Now it’s your turn.
Tell us about your sense of smell. Is it strong or weak? Thanks so much for stopping by and having fun with quotes.
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
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