By Ron Cook
It is interesting to note that our sense of smell is the strongest sense to recall memories, even of our early lives. Who can forget their mother’s freshly baked bread, the smell of the air right after a rainstorm, the beautiful aroma of a freshly blooming rose? In the month of August, we are in the midst of the dog days of summer, the trailing ending of some of nature’s most beautiful and aromatic flowering. People are like flowers as well. When I worked at a grocery store in Colorado, or in a convenience store in Texas, it was interesting how people who shop have with them an aura or milieu or particular sense, and many times even an odor, or aroma. Sometimes this tells of a recent shower, or of work, but I think other times I have smelled the scent of holiness.
My mother was an accomplished, fine artist. She could make colorful flowers that were so realistic that visitors would bend down to smell them. And so, she added a fragrance! Lovely! Her art was an expression of the sweet side of her Irish personality.
When they opened Saint Therese of the Little Flower’s grave thirty years after her death, instead of a stench, there was a powerful aroma of roses which lasted an hour.
Sister Rose Marie Garvie kept a 40-acre farm and farmhouse she called The Homes of Providence in Michigan back in the 1980’s and ‘90’s. She had a chapel and kept the house neat and pleasantly organized. She took in people from Hospice as well as individuals who needed a reset in life. I spent a year at the farm doing maintenance and building a Poustinia out of a gypsy wagon. Sister Rose has passed on, but I am sure she is with the saints, the great cloud of rose smelling witnesses.
Lou Begnaud was a sweet friend from Natchitoches, Louisiana who befriended my family. She visited my brother in Florida while he cared for our mother in the last years of her life. She also traveled to Denver to visit Dan and our mother. I met her once and like all the other saints I have met in my life, she was funny, curious, not judgmental, kind, and sweet as she told stories while sipping her beer.
There have been so many holy, wonderful Saints that I have met in my life … the last one I will mention today is my friend Jim in Alexandria. We have discussed many topics of major and minor importance with thoughtfulness and curiosity and I always come away profoundly affected, yet I leave these conversations with the Holy incense of cigars which are our shared roses.
I have a dear friend here that shares a sweet roll and a cappuccino with me from time to time. While we visit, I smell a sweet fragrance. When we part, a sweet peace stays with me for hours.
During the summer months, the days are warmer … the light is longer. We have more time and a weather kind of comfortable to enjoy nature, life, and the sweet goodness of people. Find the good … as it is wise to seek what is true, what is right, whatever is pure and lovely, whatever is admirable, excellent and praiseworthy. See these things and think about them. We live among saints … and sometimes they even smell like roses.
