What does a flood smell like?

Floodwaters take their time to recede. It’s over this period of time that the flood leaves its mark—quite literally—on everything that it touched.

It is evident in everything you can see. Moldy chairs discarded from offices and churches. Muddy and abandoned articles of clothing. Cars caked in mud, unmoved since their flooded engines turned them into useless tons of metal. Trees where the waters reached up to touch their leaves and deposit tangled trash in them. Water lines on the walls show just how high the flood stretched its arms—multiple times over multiple days—tall enough to humble us with how small we really are.

It’s overwhelming. But it’s not the scenes lining the streets that are overwhelming as much as the realization that a flood smells. It’s something that photos don’t prepare you for.

The most obvious first smell of a flood is all that mold. It’s not that you breathe in and notice the thick, undeniable presence of mold inside a building. It’s that it smothers you immediately when you walk into a flood-damaged room. Like walking into a sauna clearly coats you with moisture, the mold that is thick in the air makes you do a double take: you have to look at exposed skin for a moment because you swear that the mold is so heavy on you that you expect to see it, like a glitter veneer you’ve been painted with. But, it’s tinier than glitter, so you don’t see it, even though you feel it—inside and out. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you might just experience some disgust with each inhale, or maybe some headaches. But if you’re sensitive to it, your body will let you know: eyes tearing up, lungs coughing, nose running, all of them saying to you, “Get me out of here!”

Looking around a previously flooded building, you notice the walls are still visibly wet. How could that be, several weeks after the flood has disappeared? Touching a wall confirms what you could see: sticky moisture on the walls makes an inviting environment for that mold that seems to be the participation prize for everything that was steeped in floodwaters. With fingers still touching the wall, another thought comes to mind: rising flood waters means flooded sewage systems. It’s not just mold that still clings to those walls.

Escaping the enclosed walls to the outdoors, you’re grateful for a windy day, as chilly as it may be. Anything to whisk away that smell of damp, moist, thick, breath-stopping mold. Each deep breath feels cleansing from the inside out. You’re pretty sure the wind is whirling away that invisible glitter clinging to your skin, too.

But then, what does recovery smell like?

Recovery is a perfume that washes over the smells that linger long after leaving a moldy building. It is often said that smell is one of the strongest links to memory that we can form. If that is the case, then the smell of recovery is one that is necessary to capture deep in our memories. In this way, every time we smell recovery, we remember the hope that comes after the storm.

Recovery smells like new tarps at a distribution site. Gone are the cold-exposed nights in a home with missing or damaged walls. Or for those who still have walls, a new barrier with its sharp smell of fresh plastic covers up the moldy reminders on the walls of what has happened to them.

Recovery is the smell of fresh clothing lovingly folded into neat piles at a church. For people who have lost everything in a flood, trading out hopelessly mud-caked clothing for a new wardrobe, freshly laundered and ready to be donned, recovery is the smell of detergent that says, “I’m clean, and you’re going have dignity again.”

Recovery smells like blankets set up in a distribution to keep families warm at night. No longer do families go to sleep with the smell of must pressed up against their noses. Cloaked in a covering of fresh warmth, these blankets help households fall asleep with the smell of assurance that the flood and its remnants are in the past.

Recovery smells like brand new furniture purchased by local churches to help their hurting community members. After cleaning muck out of homes of both church members and non-church members, many churches felt the need to replace what was lost. Recovery comes as the smell of new furniture replacing the hopeless muck of furniture that can never be used again.

Recovery smells like muck kits received by families overwhelmed with cleaning out the muddy mess of their homes. Replacing the smell of muck and mold, of despair and fear, families begin anew with a freshness that washes over the past.

In the floods of life, we are left with a whole lot of muck and mold lingering in our lives. But recovery comes and removes these lingering smells from our lives. And in some small way, we begin to understand what this really means, as we replace the mold with the new.