Driving down the streets of Lake Charles, Louisiana, following Hurricane Laura, I caught a smell that brought back precious childhood memories for me. Are you familiar with the smell of wet, damp pine, wafting in the air? It is a smell, a sweet inviting smell. Really? Yes, really! You see, I grew up in the piney woods of North Louisiana. A terrain much different from south Louisiana where I have lived for over 40 years

When I was a very young boy, grade-school age, I would often accompany my stepdad on Sunday afternoons to his job as a fireman at the Pace Sawmill in Heflin, LA. The sawmill has not been in existence for many, many years. My stepdad was a fireman at the mill, not a fireman in our traditional understanding of what a fireman is or does. No, he was the fireman that made sure there was plenty of sawmill, pine chips flowing on narrow chain conveyor belt that delivered pine chips into what was call the “boiler.” The boiler was kept going, was being fueled by the pine chips to keep steam available to workings of the sawmill. On Sunday afternoons, I was go into a room full filled with the wood chips. I would shovel them onto the a conveyor belt, and the chips would be transported into a furnace that heated a boiler to keep the power of steam powering the mill. It was all child’s play to me. The smell of pine totally enveloped me a I shoveled it onto the conveyor. Sometimes I just went into pine-holding area just to roll around in the chips or jump from one pile of chips to another! And, if you know anything about fireplaces, there is nothing more pungent than lighter-pine to start a fire. Many years later, when I smell wet pine wood, it immediately takes me back to the Pace Sawmill.

Another piney memory of mine takes me back when I would get up early on cool/cold early Fall days, drive to a special area where I hunted for squirrels. Creeping to the woods, sometimes using a flashlight, to find that special pine tree, I could sit on the ground waiting for enough daylight to hunt. And there, often with my breath billowing on a cold, frosty morning, again the smell would engulf me. Pine!

Fragrances have a way of taking us back to many special memories of our lives. You can’t really plan on them; they just creep in, like the smell of chicken and dumplings. Suddenly you are taken to grandmother’s table eating your fill. Maybe it’s the smell of tobacco smoke from someone’s pipe as he walks by in the park, and you suddenly find yourself on the front porch of your old home place. There sits daddy, smoking his pipe reading the newspaper. The smell is real. So is the memory.

Now in SW Louisiana following Hurricane Laura, there are a lot of smells. Some are more tolerable than others. However, if one’s sense of smell is acute enough, if one’s sensitivity for nourishment is keenly aroused, smells abound. In one small shopping area, folks from the jambalaya capital of the word, Gonzales, LA, cook up huge pots of jambalaya. I promise you can smell it. I know from experience it is delicious. Driving by other places you people are handing out meals of smoked sausage or baked chicken or gumbo. Another establishment has free ice; another has free blue tarps

In a book in the Bible, St. Paul writes, “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.” (2 Corinthians 2:14).

I believe all these fragrances, these smells are tangible evidences of acts of mercy that swell out of the heart of God to all God’s people. Take some time to think about some of your favorite smells, fragrances.