My Smelly Husband

I’ve got a pretty good sense of smell…

Certain smells bother me badly.  When I have to help the pukers and the bleeders at work, the visuals aren’t what get to me – it’s the smell.  I can always tell when the milk is going bad long before anyone else in the house, and I once smelled a water leak in our walls before we had any other indication that there was a problem.  It creeps me out to no end to have to enter a public bathroom stall immediately after a stranger.  A few years back we had a rat die inside our walls and we couldn’t do anything but wait it out.  You know…for it to finally decompose enough to stop smelling.  I almost moved out; it was terrible.

Smells can be a wonderful thing too, though.  Thanksgiving dinner cooking.  Christmas tree lots.  Cozy candles burning on a fall or winter evening.  The smell of rain.  Clean babies.  

And my man.

As many of you have experienced in your own lives, there’s nothing quite as exciting as the smell of your new love.  Then, once you’re lucky enough to “borrow” a sweatshirt – you’re in heaven!  You don’t wash it for months!  I think I kept Andy’s (without washing it) for the entire ten months that we dated.  So new; so wonderful.

It’s a pretty cool thing that now, over twenty years later, it still makes my day when my sense of smell reminds me of him.  There are a few days each week that he leaves for work just minutes before I get home from the gym; today I actually turned on to the street as he was driving away.  When I opened the front door, I was bombarded with yummy morning smells.  The aroma of his freshly ground and brewed coffee.  The faint smell of his shower gel in the bathroom.  The lingering smell of his cologne in our bedroom.  

It takes me back to when I was 19 years old and snuggling up to his green Eddie Bauer sweatshirt.
Only now I get the real thing.
Which is even better.