The Visit

I had set up a meeting with an incoming Freshman student for yesterday who wanted to speak with me and see some of my research.  She is coming in as an Honor's student and is interested in my research and would like to volunteer in my lab.  She is a very nice young girl, who shows a pleasant level of interest and understanding of the practice of science.  I am looking forward to helping to guide her and having her work in my lab when she comes to campus this Fall.  Right now she is thinking she wants to go into medicine, but that is what a majority of biology majors initially say.  She has a long time before needing to make her final decision on what to do after graduation from her undergraduate college experience.

She is from a town that is about 3 or so hours away from the U., and she came with her mother and father.  She is the youngest of their children, and they are both in their late 50s or perhaps even a bit older.  The mother works in a pharmacy in their town and the father is a furniture maker.

When they arrived, I greeted them, and noticed that the father was a pipe smoker (I could see the stem of a pipe sticking out of his shirt pocket and I could detect the pleasant secondary aroma of the pipe he had indulged in earlier.  It had a bit of a note of burley as well as virginia leaf and had some bit of aromatic topping it as well.  I am not 100% sure about the aromatic, but it more of a mild "nutmeg" sort of topping I was not immediately identifying.

The meeting and tour lasted about an hour or so, and the young girl seemed very excited and enthused.  After I showed them around a bit, they then left and were then planning to walk around  more of campus and head to the bookstore to look at some of the texts she will need for Fall.

I spent the rest of the day working at my desk, but I have to admit that a sizable portion of my time was spent daydreaming about pipe tobacco.  The enormously pleasant aroma lead me to feel very introspective and nostalgic.  I drifted back and forth between editing a syllabus and thinking about some of my very favorite tobacco blends I have had the pleasure to indulge in through the decades. The memories were beautiful and almost akin to viewing paintings by the Impressionists in  my mind's eye.  The colors vivid and fluid, the imagery beautiful, ethereal and gentle.

Now, this morning (well actually, a bit earlier this morning, when I was running), I realized that yesterday marked 18 complete months since I started to refrain from smoking my pipes. I guess that is a milestone of sorts.

PipeTobacco