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Is it just my imagination running away with me? Or does our sense of smell really begin to fade when we reach a certain age? Is it so easy to fool our noses that we think we are smelling one thing, when in fact, we are really smelling something else?
For some reason, it just does not smell like Thanksgiving around here right now, at least not the way I remember it as a kid just a few short years ago.
Take a good whiff. Smell anything?
Remember apples, peaches, pumpkin pie, cobblers, mincemeat, pineapple upside-down cake, pound cakes, coconut cream pies, candied yams and all kinds of cookies?
Oh my goodness, our old neighborhood started cooking for Thanksgiving dinner at least two weeks ahead. There were collard greens to clean, cut and cook, onions and potatoes to peel, and pots and pans to wash for the rest of our natural lives. Getting ready for Thanksgiving was a big, big deal, and you could sense it coming no matter what side of town you lived on.
I guess we all liked to eat pretty much the same things back then, regardless of our diverse cultures and divergent neighborhoods. No matter how poor we were, the poorest people we knew in our community never went without a turkey dinner if my mom could help it. Some families cooked two turkeys and at least two hams. Others were into ducks and geese, or went for wild game like raccoons, possums, squirrels and rabbits.
Not me. If it wasn't turkey, it wasn't Thanksgiving. I'm still like that.
Thanksgiving equals turkey and trimmings (mashed potatoes, collard greens, carrots, lots of cornbread dressing, cranberry sauce, baby sweet pickles, olives, lemonade, coffee and dessert) divided by prayer, family, laughter and a football game that nobody is watching.
Sure, it was more than just a smell. It was the whole thing. It was the anticipation, the excitement of getting ready for the holiday season, and it was unmistakable when it was in the air. Some families always got started a little too soon, according to my mom. There was even one smart gentleman in the neighborhood who never even took his Christmas lights down.
Yup, he actually kept them up all year round. Of course you couldn't see them all year because he only turned them on for the holidays, but they were there, tacked along the perimeter of the porch through winter, spring and summer, ready to go again after a few bulb replacements for the next fall season.
Niagara Falls used to light up the whole Niagara Frontier with the unmistakable sights, sounds and smells of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Is it my nose, or is something missing?
Where are the celery, onions, poultry seasonings and cornbread, pumpkin and sweet potato pies? Hey, is anyone cooking giblet gravy?
Still don't smell anything?
Maybe something has actually happened to remove the smells! I know they've been putting something in the water for years, so it's possible.
I remember an experiment we did in science class to demonstrate that one of your senses can be used to fool another one. The subject is blindfolded and allowed to smell a strong onion. Then the subject is given a slice of apple to eat. The smell is so overwhelming, the subject actually believes the apple is an onion and refuses to eat it.
I don't know what the psychologists would call it, but I do believe that some of us have figured out a way to convince thousands of people simultaneously to confuse one thing for another. Apparently this trick can be applied in either direction -- the subjects can be tricked into believing that good things are bad and bad things are good.
The trick apparently works the exact same way with numbers, especially with taxes and federal funds. Watch this! See the surplus? Ha, ha. This new use of sensory manipulation may be the same type of "Potter-esque magic" that enabled cigarette hucksters to convince millions of smokers for decades that tobacco is harmless.
But how have they managed to almost entirely remove the sense of the holidays from the air in Niagara Falls?
What happened to the distinct smell of a turkey baking in the oven, or of pumpkin pie and gingerbread aromas drifting up and down the streets?
Maybe one reason the holiday spirit is not so present anymore has to do with the simple fact that half the people who used to live here when I was a kid are gone.
I guess when nearly 50,000 people leave in less than 30 years, things may seem a little different. Apparently the people who left took the wealth with them. About half of the people who still live here are classified by the Census Bureau as "poverty persons." A small group of folks who stayed here did very, very well for themselves. They got filthy rich and live real high on the hog.
Great big chunks of the city's land, which had been developed for heavy industrial use, now sit abandoned, much of it officially classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as "brownfields." That's a nice word for "contaminated with hazardous waste." No one has the tens of millions of dollars it will take to clean it up so new industries can come in and create new jobs.
So, like in some faraway undeveloped Third World country, our worn-out hulks of once-productive machine-filled factories are just sitting there in silence, like our abandoned airport, unable to generate enough wealth to permit anyone to buy a single turkey.
Smell anything yet?
Our greatest loss of people has been among our youngsters between the ages of 15 and 24. Our young fled for jobs and schools and they haven't come back. So more and more of our houses, most built before 1940, are just standing there in the cold, their inner organs exposed, waiting for the demolition ball that we can't afford either, with no hope that they will ever house the sounds and smells of a happy family.
For no apparent reason, our God-given natural beauty was made unattractive and inaccessible by some of the worst planning and architectural designs ever constructed in American history.
Still don't smell it?
Take another whiff!
This Thanksgiving, be thankful for your sense of smell or lack thereof and pray that we can pick up where we left off before they switched out on us.