A Meh Week and "when was the last time you smelled manure?"

It has been raining for days. You know, one of those pranks of summer, when first you get few days of Cuban heat, you do an inspection of all you summer dresses and start making plans about those wild bonfires on Vistula river beaches. 

And then the rain comes. 

And it rains cats and dogs for weeks. And all your summer days become Meh Days. And you know that you should be doing something constructive, that your tasks are piling up, that you should at least learn some Norwegian or practice playing ukulele if you can't do something REALLY important and urgent, but well, it's a Meh Day. You're craving for something or someone who'd give you a kick of inspiration, motivation and energy, but the only thing that's actually coming are rainy clouds outside your window. 

So this is pretty much how my past week looked like. Has been looking like, to be precise. A Meh Week. There is a golden advice saying "If nothing works, cook a soup, a soup always works". So yeah, I put my purple wellingtons on and went to our local grocery store, to get some spinach leaves. Mainly because I want to believe that my decreasing level of energy and motivation has something to do with a lack of iron in my diet, so even if it's gonna be a placebo, I'm gonna make myself a magical green spinach-iron elixir. I'm pretty sure that this is what Panoramix used to fix in his cauldron. I went out and on my way to the shop I could smell: wet soil, wet pine forest, wet, freshly sawn boards in a sawmill, wet wool and acacia blossom. Because, I must tell you, I kinda live in a countryside. It's still within the city borders but it's more like a little village, all my family lives here, we have pine forest, hedgehogs and wild boars, so you gotta be careful when you're choosing your night run route. 

We have bambis too. I wonder why aren't the prices of real estate a bit higher in my neighbourhood. Come on people, a bambi in your garden! And fierce wild boars on your running route. 

The other thing is that I'm sensitive for smells. My great-grandmother could smell sulphur from the other side of a house when my mom and her cousin were playing with matches. I think I'm the one from all ten of her great-grandchildren, who inherited increased olfactory acuity. 

Today, when I was walking to the shop, I realized I haven't been smelling real smells for a long time. Right now I'm in my room, I can smell coffee and a cinammon candle. I'm (and you're too) closed in a bubble of civilisational smells. A smell of a bus. An artificial smell of cinnamon candles. Toothpaste. Coffee. Printed book. Plastic-y smell of new clothes in H&M. Leather in a shoe shop. Parfumed lady passing by in a shopping mall. And then you go out and smell soil and pine trees and it's something unusual. When was the last time when you smelled freshly-cut grass? Manure? Water in a lake? A tomato? Yeah, I mean real tomato, not this Spanish watery crap you buy in Carrefour. (Sorry Spain, I believe that you grow awesome tomatoes, sadly the ones that you export to Poland are crap.). I love the smell of coffee and a printed book, I don't think I'm alone here, but gee, I love also freshly cut grass and pines and it's better to know where is the exit in my civilisational bubble of parfume and new clothes.

I've no idea how did my brain work during that quest for spinach leaves, and how did it happen that all those smells generated a huge longing for going somewhere I've never been to, but my brain works in mysterious ways sometimes. (Like when I wake up after a super weird dream and I'm all like "WTF brain, seriously!?"). What's more, it also made me listen to a prehistoric music and wear a lumberjane checked shirt. But this is a story for another blog post.