The Fragrance of Suburbia

It was a glorious day. Saturday afternoon. No school for a week. On a walk with my daughter. The birds were chirping, the sun was shining and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The air still maintained a mid-February chill, but it was tinged with a promise of warmer weather. You could smell it. Almost taste it. The aroma was pervasive throughout my short walk around our condominium complex. I liked it; it was clean and fresh, almost like perfume. It reminded me of the overwhelming fragrance of jasmine that accompanied springtime in my old neighborhood. But this definitely wasn't jasmine. Nor any other flower I had ever experienced. I chalked it up to some kind of scrub brush or lavender or other foreign plant indigenous to the hills surrounding our house.

On the walk back towards home, it dawned on me. It was Saturday in the suburbs: laundry day. What I smelled in the air that was not an exotic plant or the promise of spring. It was the aroma of laundry detergent, expelled from two hundred vents in two hundred garages, that saturated the neighborhood.

When Dave and I tell some of the older members of our congregation where we live, we often hear, "I used to hunt bobcats up in those hills" or "That whole area was all chicken farms in my day." I used to vehemently begrudge new developments and cookie-cutter houses and gated communities... until we moved here. Now, I am so thankful for our little postage stamp of property. However, I can't help but wonder what a Saturday afternoon walk in mid-February would have smelled like back then.