I grew up in southeastern Virginia, spent ten years in central North Carolina, and then three years in Louisville, Kentucky for seminary. My part of Virginia was flat, flat, flat with creeks and rivers, lakes, bays and endless ocean around every corner. Greensboro was hillier and 5 hours (just imagine!) 5 hours from the ocean. But it still had plenty of lakes and lush, green parks like home. Louisville, well, if you’ve never been there, it’s hilly, green, has a great river running through the city, and lots of arts and business downtown. For all of their differences, the places that I lived were leaf-y, water-y, and within a day’s drive of home.
Until… I heard God’s voice leading me in some surprising ways. First, to get married and then to find out that our home would be in central New Mexico! God called me some place new – to a life that was new. In principle, I was very excited about this – I mean, New Mexico adventure? Umm, yes please!
But the town we were moving to had 160 residents – total. And there weren’t great rivers and endless oceans. The rolling green hills and lakes around every corner were….well, they just weren’t there. It was dry, the dirt was bleached, the land was mountainous. There were plants, but they weren’t fresh and happy and green – they were scrubby; they were desert survivors and some of them were spiky, aggressive cacti! In our town and in Roswell where my first pastorate was, the world around me looked more like the backdrop of Wile E. Coyote taking on the Road Runner than it did like reality as I knew it. I was far from home and I couldn’t just hop back there in a day on a whim. Despite the giddiness of being a newlywed, some part of my heart was heavy because everything just looked so dry and dead and sad to me.
One day, I was on a long drive, struggling to see the beauty that was surely around me and failing rather miserably at it. I could admit it: I was homesick. When, what did I smell but something terribly strong, something incredibly familiar? Wherever you are, whatever different climate or context you find yourself in, when someone has angered a skunk – there’s a stench that is beyond compare. And it smelled exactly the same as every skunk I’d ever driven past in Virginia and North Carolina and Kentucky. Every other time I had plugged up my nose and tried to bear through that awful, awful smell. But that day in New Mexico…now, don’t laugh, y’all…but that day my little homesick heart sniffed so deeply of that horrible stink. Suddenly, I was home! With the awfulness of skunk, home wasn’t impossibly far away, out of reach, lost in the wasteland. Home was right here with that irritable skunk. And I thanked God – I thanked God that day and every day that I have smelled a skunk from that day forward.
Smells are powerful – they can brighten our day, remind us of who we are, fill us with peace. But they can also awaken deep memories within us more clearly than any other sense.