The Scent of School Supplies
Come closer, dear child. You have the most intoxicating aroma about you. It smells like new school supplies.
That pack on your back has the pungent, stiff fragrance of new plastic -- the kind you find on character book bags, in pencil boxes, and wafting around action figures patiently waiting for you to come home and play.
Those pencils smell like soft wood shavings, faintly cedar, and cool stony graphite. Your rectangular pink eraser, bright as bubble gum, has the essence of rubber and vinyl and the hope of getting it right on the third try.
And this package of construction paper has a bouquet like cardboard, but far sweeter and softer. It brings to mind the creamy, faintly chemical smell of Elmer's glue. I bet you have some of that in there, too, just waiting to be globbed onto thirsty paper.
You're going to take those redolent school supplies with you into a classroom, child, where you'll be greeted by more odors whose memory will stay with you well past your youth. The perfume of chilly, humid clouds pumping out of air conditioners recently awakened from a long restful summer. The cold metallic scent of desks that seem impossibly alien. The powdery, dry smell of chalk. (I hear they've done away with that. Pity.) And the faintly camphorous fragrance of floor cleanser that got the tiles so clean, they would only let go of your new tennis shoes with a squeak.
Hold on to these scents, little one. Years from now you may use them to transport you back to your own childhood, when life was a big wondrous garden waiting to be explored and reveled in. Stop and smell every little thing you can. Drink it in with deep, satisfying gulps. It will sustain you through the long course of adulthood.
That pack on your back has the pungent, stiff fragrance of new plastic -- the kind you find on character book bags, in pencil boxes, and wafting around action figures patiently waiting for you to come home and play.
Those pencils smell like soft wood shavings, faintly cedar, and cool stony graphite. Your rectangular pink eraser, bright as bubble gum, has the essence of rubber and vinyl and the hope of getting it right on the third try.
And this package of construction paper has a bouquet like cardboard, but far sweeter and softer. It brings to mind the creamy, faintly chemical smell of Elmer's glue. I bet you have some of that in there, too, just waiting to be globbed onto thirsty paper.
You're going to take those redolent school supplies with you into a classroom, child, where you'll be greeted by more odors whose memory will stay with you well past your youth. The perfume of chilly, humid clouds pumping out of air conditioners recently awakened from a long restful summer. The cold metallic scent of desks that seem impossibly alien. The powdery, dry smell of chalk. (I hear they've done away with that. Pity.) And the faintly camphorous fragrance of floor cleanser that got the tiles so clean, they would only let go of your new tennis shoes with a squeak.
Hold on to these scents, little one. Years from now you may use them to transport you back to your own childhood, when life was a big wondrous garden waiting to be explored and reveled in. Stop and smell every little thing you can. Drink it in with deep, satisfying gulps. It will sustain you through the long course of adulthood.
So true!
ReplyDelete