The Smell of a Place [David Kludt]

I live in a beautiful and diverse neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles. Depending on which way I walk when I step outside my house, I enter either Little Armenia or Thai Town. Some of our favorite local spots are owned by Salvadoran and Filipino families. If I venture out bit further I walk through Koreatown, Little Bangladesh, hipster-filled Sunset Junction, or into the glamor of the Hollywood Hills.

This might sound strange, but one of the ways I’ve recently been coming to notice and appreciate all the diversity around me is in the vast array of smells present in this place. You wouldn’t notice this if you drove through my neighborhood; cars have a remarkable ability to block out every smell except for the bland scent of used car. Choose mass transit and you’ll start to notice the smells. Sweaty kids on and off their skateboards. Sleeping security guards holding a cold burrito headed home after a 12-hour shift. Perfumed grandmas navigating the city’s transit system with groceries and kids in tow.

But the real scent explosion happens when you walk or bike through the neighborhood. You’ll notice the hot dampness of the cleaners venting air out onto the street. Near the old sanctuary our church uses for our gatherings, you’ll definitely pass the “stinky corner.” You’ll get whiffs of blossoming jacaranda and jasmine blending with the smell of sidewalks stained with the scents of our neighbors who shelter on them at night. You’ll smell Armenian bakery, Thai BBQ, and fresh-roasted coffee mixed with the signature blend of Angeleno air (smog, gasoline with a hint of salty-sea).

Wendell Berry has written that “an adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.” You have to be within arm’s stretch of the people around you in order to care for them, one human to another. Love doesn’t allow you to keep your hands clean on one side of the road while someone suffers on the other.

Working from my scent-based description of the neighborhood in which I live and minister, you could say that good care and presence in a place – ministry, pastoring, leadership – means you have to know how your neighborhood smells. And, eventually, you need to start to smell like the neighborhood around you.

Smell is the sense that is most powerfully connected to memory. Intrinsically connected to the things we smell are the joys, loves, tensions, and sorrows of the places we live.

To be rooted in a place – to love and serve a place – means we have to close enough to smell that place, and to smell like that place.