A Little "Smell" of Home!

Trees have a smell. A fantastic smell. This was not something I realized until my first spring in New Mexico. I was substituting at the former sister charter to our ALDR in a third/fourth class.

I was walking them to the bathroom and the walkway took us through a tunnel of trees that I marveled at because you rarely see that many in one place here. I inhaled and stopped. Stopped dead. Children ran into to me I stopped so suddenly. I inhaled again. It hit me. The walkway smelled like the road in front of my house back home which was uncanny because my house is surrounded by beautiful tall majestic trees, tall weeks, ferns...everything that New Mexico doesn't have...yet there was that smell. I turned around and instructed all the students to "smell in" (love English language learners, inhale was a little advanced for them.) They did. "What Ms. Knitter, what are we smelling?" "This is what my street in Massachusetts smells like." I informed them. Blank looks. None of them was anywhere near as impressed as I was. We walked on.

Three weeks later, The Boy and I rode our bikes to campus. Which also has beautifully lined pathways with trees and it happened again. The Boy and I discussed it and we discovered that the trees hanging over us were Beechnut trees, the same trees that lined the eastern side of my road!

As I was riding my bike through campus today, I smelled it again. How I love it. It really was 'a little smell of home." I never really realized what my own street smelled like until I was 2000 miles away.