6/20/2006 -- A salmon starts life as an egg, deposited in the bottom of a stream or river by its mother, and lightly covered with a bit of sand or gravel where it will spend a few weeks to a few months growing into a young fish. During that time, the very essence of the water, its taste or smell imprints itself upon that fish and when it matures in later life, it remembers that smell and returns there to spawn itself. A Pacific salmon does this once and dies. The Atlantic salmon does this every couple of years, not dying but getting bigger each time it returns to spawn--always brought back to the same place--the scent of home.

While the preceding idea is not exactly news to many people, the very concept of how strongly it must manifest itself is a hard thing to fathom.

We play a game called mammas and babies with Kindergarten students each year. Kids are given film canisters in which I have placed cotton balls with various scents. The class is divided into two groups. One group smells a canister, and then sets it down. The other set of kids in random, collect a canister and then the first kid (the mamma) has to go from kid to kid until they find their baby. This usually works pretty good as my scents are quite different from one another:  cinnamon, blueberry, chocolate and the like. But imagine the difficulty that a mother deer might be facing if she is trying to find her own vagrant offspring by smelling for its own foot prints among the rest of the herd.

I don’t know when exactly that I noticed it as a boy, but my Uncle and Aunt’s house had a distinctive pleasant aroma. It was the scent of home, or family--of good things. The house was where my grandmother lived up until the time she passed away when I was about 7 or 8. We used to journey there frequently, every month or two and certainly on holidays when I was young, but less so, maybe once a year in more recent times.

My grandmother passed away, and just a few years ago, my uncle passed away. My aunt continued to live there until this winter. The aroma never changed during the passing of time or people. Certainly it was an indefinable scent, perhaps the smell of cooking, the spice rack, maybe a soap or other tangible quality. Maybe even house plants as my grandmother had a bay window filled with them and my aunt maintained that window through all the passing years. It was a good scent, something I looked forward to later in life. It was something that would tickle the nostrils when you first stepped into the porch, but after that, receded into the background.

It was still there this past thanksgiving when we gathered (it turns out one last time).

Well, my aunt entered assisted living this winter and now the house sits empty. Only last weekend did I venture back to the house to help my dad with a small project. I was anticipating that smell, perhaps one last time before somebody else would own the house and I would never return.

Opening the door, I soon discovered it was gone. No aroma. The house was still functioning, refrigerator running, most of the belongings still there, you could probably find a meal if you were willing to defrost or open a can or two, so by no means was the house abandoned. But the aroma was gone.

I mentioned this to my dad. “It’s gone,” I said, and proceeded to explain. “I can’t smell anything anymore,” he said, and told me how the past few years had erased most of his olfactory ability. But after thinking a bit, he related that when he was a boy, his aunt Vene’s house had a distinctive aroma, probably baking and spices he thought.

So, at long last, I think I know how a salmon must feel when it arrives “home” and discovers the “scent of home” only now it’s gone, and I’ll probably never scent it again.