I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

It's summer, and I can smell it in the air.

One whiff of chlorine or sunscreen, and I'm carried back to the swimming pool of my childhood,

and all of the sense memories that come with that.

The paintbrush tip of the end of my wet ponytail.

The hot pavement under my bare feet.

The tarry cloth towel wrapped around me.

Other smells take me back in time, too.

Cut grass, campfire smoke, or shallomar, my grandmother's perfume.

Research has shown that our sense of smell, the olfactory sense, is the one most closely associated with memory.

The olfactory bulb runs from the nose to the base of the brain

and is directly connected to regions of the brain

linked to memory and emotion.

No wonder some smells can conjure memories instantaneously.

But what about sounds? Tires on a rainy street, ocean waves, even certain ringtones

are like time machines, transporting me to other times and other places. Music itself is a time machine. The other day, I heard a Donna Summer song and was

immediately six years old again, dancing with my younger sisters in the family room of my

childhood home, while that record spun on my parents' turntable.

I've been a music lover all my life. In fact, listening to music was my gateway to writing poems.

I started with my parents' records, then my own cassettes and CDs. I used to listen to the same songs over and over,

writing down the lyrics and thinking about what the images and metaphors meant to me.

Today's poem is a celebration of sound, and also a celebration of our own power to interpret sound and make meaning, as poets do.

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