Ocean Breezes

It is amazing how smell will evoke powerful memories.

I have a friend who is struggling with late stage cancer, it's pretty much throughout her system and chemo is taking a heavy toll. The other day she told me she wanted to go for a drive to the ocean. The Pacific ocean is only probably about 15 miles from her house on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula, so we headed out for a late morning drive to the coast.

She had grown up in Boston and the sea wasn't far from her house, so she said that the salt sea air was very nostalgic for her. As we crested the foothills toward the ocean, she was excited to see the fog bank that lay along the coast like a wooly blanket. We found a place to pull off at the beach and she rolled down her window and took a big whiff. The air had that heavy with moisture feel and sure enough, a kind of stinky crab kind of smell that she said brought her right back to her childhood.

She didn't have the energy to get out and walk and just that short drive took a toll, she was pretty tired when I got her back home. Bless her heart! May God be with you on this journey, my dear friend, and bless you with more happy smells!