Day 2

Eastern Time Zone!! Our Highway 20 ride was long, long, long today. We started listening to one of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti books on tape, saw the highways and byways of Alabama, and ended the day in Columbus, Georgia. No Savannah, tonight, but we should reach Savannah early afternoon.

While driving, I thought about a photo I took yesterday. In college, I had a wonderful English Literature professor, Dr. B. J. Alexander, who often posed deep, pondering questions to our class of 25 students. One day Dr. Alexander posed a question to our class early in the semester..."From where do ideas come?" 20+ years later, I still think about that question trying to give it a reasonable answer, but I haven't been able to come up with an answer that holds true time and time again.

When thinking about that question though, I often wonder about another question Dr. Alexander posed to us..."Which of the five senses is the most important?" While I have not answered Dr. Alexander's first question, yet, I have definitively answered the second--the sense of smell.

I have lost friends and students, but I have only had three relatives die during my 43 years orbiting the sun--both my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandmother, and their deaths did not occur until I was in my late teens and mid-20s. My parents are older than other people my age, so my childhood has always been filled with family stories, and each of the kids in our family can vividly recount tales of black and white pictures in the photo albums of our parents and grandparents.

In visiting Marshall's T & P railroad yesterday with Mom, I learned an important lesson that will be incredibly painful sometime in the distant future (very distant, hopefully). Six years ago, I was working on creating a new flower bed. I have always liked railroad ties for borders for flowerbeds and was looking for six ties. There is a Union Pacific track about four miles from my house, and they were replacing the ties and spikes. I met the workers one morning to ask if I could buy six used ties from them, and the fellows told me I could have them, if I would come back that afternoon with a truck. I walked over to Mom and Dad's intending to borrow Dad's truck, which is almost always a guaranteed, "Yes." However, when I told my parents of my endeavor, they both said, "No." I was really shocked, but then, Mom and Dad said it would be too painful for them if I used railroad ties. That is all they said, no explanation, no nothing, and I didn't press the issue, mainly because I was so shocked.

Yesterday, Mom told me several of her childhood stories about the depot and riding on the trains as we walked through the museum. When we walked outside, Mom said that if she remembered correctly, passengers had to walk up those stairs to reach the waiting platform, so up I went. I took a photo from the cover of the platform looking down the tracks as if I was a passenger waiting on a train. Then, the wind picked up, and the smell of creosote inundated my nostrils. Every train story that my parents shared with me came flooding in to my consciousness, rapidly. Creosote, creosote would have brought back more memories than my parents wanted to remember; that's why Mom and Dad said no to the ties six years ago.

The sense of smell is the first one we know; it's how babies identify their mother; it's what makes food taste great and flowers look beautiful. Smell, I know the ones I cherish today and hope never to know after my parents are gone. Smell, and all is answered.