Charlie, our beagle, might have the most powerful nose in Del Ray. Wednesday night I spent 10 minutes on our kitchen floor trying to fish out a piece of dog food from underneath the refrigerator. This was not an attempt at fall house cleaning.  It was because of our dog's nose.

Before I arrived on the scene, Charlie had spent the previous 10 minutes sitting in front of the fridge whining and shoving his snout after that lone piece of dog food that had somehow found its way under there.

This scene is a regular occurrence in our house. His expert nose does not miss a piece of stray food. And no matter how often I doubt him, his nose is never wrong.

The location of the unreachable stray dog food will change—behind a closed door, underneath the couch, in back of the TV—but the reaction is always the same. Charlie sits in front of where the smell emanates and whines until we solve his problem. Early on in the life of this routine there were a few times when I slid a couch or opened a door only to find nothing. I remember giving Charlie disappointed looks and telling him he was crazy. But his whining would persist causing me to investigate more. And sure enough, there was always a piece of kibble to be found.

So when we are on walks through Del Ray it is no surprise that Charlie seems fascinated by just about everything we pass. The same was true when I lived in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Charlie's nose found anything bad the neighborhood streets had to offer. Discarded chicken bones were his greatest vice.

Del Ray, luckily, has less chicken bones in the streets, but Charlie hardly seems to be at a loss for smells. The gardens, and especially the thick, grass-like plants that line the yards in Del Ray, seem to be a treasure trove of scents.

Even Layla, our Cavalier, has learned to rely on Charlie's nose. On walks she will be off smelling some great find, but if Charlie starts sniffing intently elsewhere she knows it will be better than whatever she has her nose in and darts over.

So with all that in mind, it is odd what pops into your head as you are stretched out across the kitchen floor on your belly, swatting at a piece of dog food stuck under a refrigerator. For me, it was a few lines from a Virginia Woolf book that I haven't even read but the passage had come my way somehow. It is about Flush, a cocker spaniel:

"Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell."

And most importantly for Charlie, kibble is smell. A smell that can never be ignored.