This was not the first time I realized I was totally weird.
Day 01 - Introduce yourself
Day 02 - Your first love
Day 03 - Your parents
Day 04 - What you ate today
Day 05 - Your definition of love
Day 06 - Your day
Day 07 - Your best friend
Day 08 - A moment
Day 09 - Your beliefs
Day 10 - What you wore today
Day 11 - Your siblings
Day 12 - What’s in your bag
Day 13 - This week
Day 14 - What you wore today
Day 15 - Your dreams
Day 16 - Your first kiss
Day 17 - Your favorite memory
Day 18 - Your favorite birthday
Day 19 - Something you regret
Day 20 - This month
Day 21 - Another moment
Day 22 - Something that upsets you
Day 23 - Something that makes you feel better
Day 24 - Something that makes you cry
Day 25 - A first
Day 26 - Your fears
Day 27 - Your favorite place
Day 28 - Something that you miss
Day 29 - Your aspirations
Day 30 - One last moment
My first love was scent.
I was always a sniffer as a kid. I smelled things as a teen. I can still be caught snuffling stuff as an adult.
I was born nearly blind and my parents didn't notice it. They thought they had a perfect baby. I was their first, and a record-setter (longest baby on Arizona record, ever, at 26 inches at birth), and I didn't cry, and I was beautiful to them.
Disregard the fact that I had the biggest eyes in all the nursery at church. Disregard that I sat about one-and-a-half feet from the TV -- all kids did that. Disregard the fact that every photo of me, when I was told a photo was being taken, had a scrunched face like this:
(It's not my horrible attempts to smile and not knowing how. It's my struggling to see the photographer and see where the lens was coming from exactly.)
In fact, it wasn't until right before I went to kindergarten that my pediatrician noticed I was squinting at him while he stood across the room that they checked me. The first five years of my life are made of distorted images, and colors, and feelings, and smells, and nothing clear, because of this, except for the few things that I was given to put in my hands and could therefore shove towards my face, to see in detail.
When I was younger, it got me in trouble, the sniffing. It had to be done in secret, when people didn't look at me, so they didn't know I was a weirdo. People comment on that sort of thing.
Here's my most vivid memory of smelling, and the one that triggers me to answer scent as being my first love, as it was the thing I'd take risks for and compromise for and hold on to above all else, for it was all I had:
This one time, when I was at my babysitter's, just four years old, I got in my worst trouble from it. It was a busy morning and she was rushed. She plunked down 4 bowls of oatmeal in front of me and her 3 kids. The older sisters had been fighting all morning before we had to strop them off at school and my babysitter was frustrated with them, her patience frayed -- certainly not the time to give her any reason to turn her attention to me and her youngest daughter instead.
As she turned her back to us, I bowed my head to sniff the oatmeal that had just been placed in front of me, the same oatmeal I had been given countless times before, thinking it was safe. It unfortunately wasn't; it was the straw that broke the camel's back; as my babysitter saw me sniff the oatmeal, she decided I was judging her and all she stood for, apparently. She trudged over, irate that I question her offering of a wholesome breakfast and, without a word, grabbed the ice-cold gallon of milk she had just set on the table for the older girls to pour into our cups, cracked the new safety seal around the lip of the jug, hold it directly over my head of long brown hair, and tipped it on its head. As the ounces of the milk poured out, awkwardly gulping as it cascaded over me, no one said a word, not even the babysitter. She let it all drain before slamming the empty container down on the breakfast table, turning around, and going to her room for a few moments of silence.
When I was certain, this time, that she had truly left the room, as I heard the door slam, I looked down at my arm, covered in the milk, warming on my skin. I know it was wrong to react the way I did, after what had happened, but it was my only natural reaction, I think, that I had left. I brought my arm to my nose and huffed in the scent, let it overtake me. I breathed it in and smelled milk, and understood it completely different than I ever had before.
It was how I experienced the world, for a long time. All things. Every thing. My first inclination to experience anything, now, is to first sniff it, to absorb facts through the way things smell.
I love smelling things.
Day 02 - Your first love
Day 03 - Your parents
Day 04 - What you ate today
Day 05 - Your definition of love
Day 06 - Your day
Day 07 - Your best friend
Day 08 - A moment
Day 09 - Your beliefs
Day 10 - What you wore today
Day 11 - Your siblings
Day 12 - What’s in your bag
Day 13 - This week
Day 14 - What you wore today
Day 15 - Your dreams
Day 16 - Your first kiss
Day 17 - Your favorite memory
Day 18 - Your favorite birthday
Day 19 - Something you regret
Day 20 - This month
Day 21 - Another moment
Day 22 - Something that upsets you
Day 23 - Something that makes you feel better
Day 24 - Something that makes you cry
Day 25 - A first
Day 26 - Your fears
Day 27 - Your favorite place
Day 28 - Something that you miss
Day 29 - Your aspirations
Day 30 - One last moment
My first love was scent.
I was always a sniffer as a kid. I smelled things as a teen. I can still be caught snuffling stuff as an adult.
I was born nearly blind and my parents didn't notice it. They thought they had a perfect baby. I was their first, and a record-setter (longest baby on Arizona record, ever, at 26 inches at birth), and I didn't cry, and I was beautiful to them.
Disregard the fact that I had the biggest eyes in all the nursery at church. Disregard that I sat about one-and-a-half feet from the TV -- all kids did that. Disregard the fact that every photo of me, when I was told a photo was being taken, had a scrunched face like this:
(It's not my horrible attempts to smile and not knowing how. It's my struggling to see the photographer and see where the lens was coming from exactly.)
In fact, it wasn't until right before I went to kindergarten that my pediatrician noticed I was squinting at him while he stood across the room that they checked me. The first five years of my life are made of distorted images, and colors, and feelings, and smells, and nothing clear, because of this, except for the few things that I was given to put in my hands and could therefore shove towards my face, to see in detail.
When I was younger, it got me in trouble, the sniffing. It had to be done in secret, when people didn't look at me, so they didn't know I was a weirdo. People comment on that sort of thing.
Here's my most vivid memory of smelling, and the one that triggers me to answer scent as being my first love, as it was the thing I'd take risks for and compromise for and hold on to above all else, for it was all I had:
This one time, when I was at my babysitter's, just four years old, I got in my worst trouble from it. It was a busy morning and she was rushed. She plunked down 4 bowls of oatmeal in front of me and her 3 kids. The older sisters had been fighting all morning before we had to strop them off at school and my babysitter was frustrated with them, her patience frayed -- certainly not the time to give her any reason to turn her attention to me and her youngest daughter instead.
As she turned her back to us, I bowed my head to sniff the oatmeal that had just been placed in front of me, the same oatmeal I had been given countless times before, thinking it was safe. It unfortunately wasn't; it was the straw that broke the camel's back; as my babysitter saw me sniff the oatmeal, she decided I was judging her and all she stood for, apparently. She trudged over, irate that I question her offering of a wholesome breakfast and, without a word, grabbed the ice-cold gallon of milk she had just set on the table for the older girls to pour into our cups, cracked the new safety seal around the lip of the jug, hold it directly over my head of long brown hair, and tipped it on its head. As the ounces of the milk poured out, awkwardly gulping as it cascaded over me, no one said a word, not even the babysitter. She let it all drain before slamming the empty container down on the breakfast table, turning around, and going to her room for a few moments of silence.
When I was certain, this time, that she had truly left the room, as I heard the door slam, I looked down at my arm, covered in the milk, warming on my skin. I know it was wrong to react the way I did, after what had happened, but it was my only natural reaction, I think, that I had left. I brought my arm to my nose and huffed in the scent, let it overtake me. I breathed it in and smelled milk, and understood it completely different than I ever had before.
It was how I experienced the world, for a long time. All things. Every thing. My first inclination to experience anything, now, is to first sniff it, to absorb facts through the way things smell.
I love smelling things.