Olfactory Bunny

What I grew up calling an Eskimo Kiss is actually a bastardization of the "Kunik."  It's an Inuit greeting that involves pressing one's nose close to another's cheek and inhaling their scent.  It's a greeting exchanged by people already familiar to one another - like a kiss.  Kunik cousins. 

I call my kids bunnies.  They are positively lapine.  Little soft animals with sensitive noses and big eyes.  Sometimes they just sit in the grass; other times they cavort.  Like bunnies.

If Vivian had a superpower, it would be her sense of smell.  Every night when I tuck her in, she tells me what I smell like.  Sometimes it's really elaborate:  Mama, you smell like a sweet potato with butter on it.  Sometimes I don't smell so good:  Ew, Mama, you smell like old garlic.  Tonight it was: Mama, your cheek smells like face soap, but your breath smells like what we had for dinner.  That would be leftover split pea soup, quinoa, and garden tomato.  Mmmm.

Smells figure prominently in my memory.  When we took a road trip to West Virginia, my mom would roll down the windows and crow about smelling "West Virginia."  West Virginia is the smell of freshly cut grass, dank hollows, and sweet rolling evening mists.  Also, when we drove over the marsh:  "Smell that?  That's the marsh!  Mmmmm...I love it."  The marsh smells thick and dense and salty - both living and dead all at the same time.  My dad had a very sensitive sense of smell - he could smell gum from a mile away and hate it from that distance.  But he loved the Lake Okeechobee smell of sweet rotting citrus mixed with fresh pines.  That was a good one.  My dad wore Drakkar Noir...and Old Spice.  My mom wore Charlie.  I passed a whiff of "Charlie" in Sears one day when I was a fledged adult and nearly fell over.  That singular smell was coming from a table full of different half-off perfumes, and I smelled them all until I found hers.  Wow - there it was, like a freight train of memory.  I still find it amusing that my mom's smell could have a name - an 80's Designer name: "Charlie." 

I hold dear the smell of beer on Pop-pop's kind breath when he hugged me goodnight with his bristle face.  And Mimi's martini lingering on hers.

Ah, smells: the smell of dirt, the smell of hot beach sand, the smell of an old conch, the smell of an oven-hot car on a 105-degree day.  Lunchroom smells, the smell in the parking lot beside MacDonalds.  The warm feral smell of my cat's meticulously clean fur.  The bready smell of my sweaty babies.

My sweaty babies are still my sweaty babies - in summer when we're skimping on the A/C.  When I lean in to smell their cheeks, the crowns of their heads at night, they still smell utterly distinct, utterly like themselves.  Flopsy and Mopsy after a meal of cream and blackberries.  Saturating the air within 10 millimeters of their skin with utter sweetness.