The scents of places

One of the things that I've noticed more consciously since moving to Nova Scotia is how the scent of a residence reflects the person (people) who live there. There's that scent of "home" that always greets you after a hard day or a long trip away. It's very comforting. One of the things that I noticed when I was home for Christmas is that my parents' house's scent has changed. I guess that whatever partial scent that I added to it was missing, and it was strangely sad to make the long journey home to arrive somewhere that smelled as foreign as a stranger's house. It was a bit of a relief to go back to Nova Scotia to my apartment, which greeted me with its familiar scent when I arrived. The scents I'm talking about are nothing tangible - not the particular smell of your favourite food or perfume, though I imagine those contribute. No, I mean just the general ambient smell of a place.

What I've noticed on my visit this time is that my bedroom here smells different than the rest of the house - more welcoming. It smells like my youth, kind of, though that sounds a little weird. It smells like home, my old familiar home. My bedroom in Nova Scotia has a different scent to it (which I find a little strange since it's my bedroom both times) but also welcoming. Walking in there, I know that it's mine and that the bed is waiting to embrace me anytime I want it. My apartment in Nova Scotia smells like home to me, a new home, a home that is all mine. That's partly what makes it so hard to leave to come back to Ontario - it's a place that is uniquely mine in a way that nowhere here is.

Perhaps these musings make me sound like I'm homesick for Nova Scotia. I'm not really. There are parts of my life there that I miss already - high speed internet on my laptop, my shower with its wonderful water pressure, my large bed - but nothing that is interrupting my stay here. I like being in my bedroom with its zillions of books, all waiting to be read and remembered, and I like being with my family again and being back at home, in a fuller sense of the word.

Anyway, on to more concrete things. Anie spent the day here today. She got me out of bed at 8am. Usually, this is cause for assault, especially since I went to sleep at 2am, but when someone is so excited about you being awake that they are jumping up and down and running ahead of you to the kitchen so that they can eat breakfast with you, and when they're 3 1/2 and very cute, it's hard to stay mad.

These are the books that I got on Tuesday: The Way the Crow Flies by Anne Marie MacDonald, Emma by Jane Austen, Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon ($5 special!), and one more book that I can't remember the name of right now, and then 2 fantasy novels from the series that I'm addicted too, even as I critique the writing style. Good times all round.

Not much to say now. It is getting late. I should get to bed.