I have this face lotion with SPF 20 in it. It's the only "make-up" I took with me to Uganda last year. I don't use it regularly, but this morning, I was too lazy to go to the bedroom and get my usual lotion, so I grabbed this out of my make-up case that was on the bathroom counter. As I rubbed it on, the smell wafted towards my nose and brought with it feelings of heat, dirt, tiredness, stomach cramps, and a sense of joy and adventure and love and community and all of the jumbled physical and emotional memories of our friends in Uganda. Sometimes I think that, more than the others, smell is the sensory capability most directly linked to our souls.

In the 40 seconds that it took me to apply the lotion to my face, I reflected on how much has changed in the past year. As I looked out of the bathroom and saw our Christmas tree in the living room, I remembered how strange last Christmas was; we didn't have a tree, we didn't see our families, we just hopped on a plane with a backpack and 4 friends and headed across the world. It was something I never thought I would do.

As I sit here now, smelling the remnants of the lotion on my fingers, I wonder what else I'll do in the next few years that I can't see on the horizon before me now. I wonder what other smells will indelibly mark my memory and shape my experience of the world. It seems futile to speculate about the future, since so far, most of my speculations have been wrong. For now, I'll just sit on knowledge that smelling this lotion makes me feel like it's time to crawl into the back of the Land Rover and take another bumpy ride down a dirt road, staring through cloudy glass at the unknown.