Scent of a Dog

I have been thinking about scents lately. It's not that I want to think about them. I just can't seem to escape them.

The other night on our walk, Sophie, our Catahoula Leopard dog, was charging out of the driveway with her nose to the ground like a bloodhound. Who knows what she was smelling. The whole walk she seemed to be in pursuit of something invisible that was long since gone. Each season seems to bring a whole assortment of exciting new scents that gets her tail wagging and nose twitching.

Tonight at the gym I started doing a new stretch to ward off the pain from Piriformis Syndrome that I sometimes get. This stretch requires that I lie down on the bench face down with one leg hanging off the side. As I got into this position, my nose came "face to face" with the very strong scent of men's hair product left behind by a man who had been there sometime before me. The scent was so strong it could even have been hours that he had since left the gym and the scent still wouldn't have time to dissipate.

Later in my stretches I did a couple yoga poses on a mat while a woman stood on a wobble board next to me for strength and balance. The scent of her lotion was so strong I actually did leave to go do something else.

So, while I am trying to not smell things, Sophie is just a happy little girl wagging her tail following whatever invisible trail she "sees" with her nose.

The scents that do bother me seem to be everywhere. Earlier in the week I considered how I might correctly complain about a woman at work who seems to think that perfume in the office can somehow be pleasant for anyone else in the office other than herself. (If you are at all conflicted, let me break it to you. It is not.)

In the evening, when Sophie has finally wound down and has curled up next to me on the couch, I like to nuzzle my nose into the thick fur around her neck. Mmmm. She has that summer dog sort of smell. It's not as bad as wet dog, but it is still a bit fragrant. Ever since she got too big to wash in our laundry tub downstairs, we take her to get a shampoo and have her nails trimmed every few weeks, which is quite honestly something I never thought I would do for a dog, like ever. I rarely get my own nails done. But really, I mostly don't mind her smell and hardly notice. It's just Sophie.

While the scent that people put on themselves to make themselves smell better seems to repel me, Sophie's natural scent is far more pleasant and even soothing somehow. I'm certainly not advocating that people go natural in the scent arena, but a little discretion and moderation would be welcome.

I thought that perhaps in protest I would start wearing Sophie scent somehow. But then I realized that when I came home little Sophie might bark at me, not knowing who I was. If I did this at work, people might also get the notion to pet me or worse just want to send me outside. And, since I like how her tail wags when I come home and she tries to sniff out my scent among all of the other foreign scents on me from the day, I guess that is, well, it's nothing to sniff at.