I really enjoy the company of adults much older than myself. I want to sit with them and hear their stories. I want to help them paw through their collections of clippings, photographs, and tchotchkes. The elderly have an altogether different "bouquet". Infused with what one might call the tincture of a long and well lived life, they are earthier than kids and most younger adults. Or, maybe because they've had so many experiences, the scent of memory just seeps out of their pores.
Smell is the sense from which I get the greatest number of emotional residuals. You can tell me about your life and your experiences but if you describe the smell which surrounded you during a particular juncture or you are bringing me somewhere, either physically or verbally, to show or explain something and a scent finds its way to me, I will forever associate that aroma with whatever emotion I feel at the time. I also have one hell of a sniffer. My husband refers to me as The Bloodhound. I take it as a compliment.
You can tell a lot about a person by what they deem to be their most favorite smell: the air after a soaking rain; bacon frying in a cast iron skillet; the roses that we are supposed to stop and linger upon; old hockey equipment; night blooming jasmine...
Essences that make me happiest include:
the acrid static that comes off of a vinyl record album played over and over again;
the fermented gummy rubber smell of new sneakers right out of the box;
the sour drag of stale coffee left on a warm burner for an unknown number of hours;
and the chemical aura of a newspaper, unfolded and inky on the kitchen table waiting to be read.
But it seems I also have quite a sizable list of smells that make me sad.
While walking past some freshly built homes recently, and others in a state of unfinished construction, I asked hubs to pause for a thirty second stop with me so that I could press my sensitive nose against the just-hewn boards. He knows me well, so he does not question my compulsive, urgent need. Deliberately positioning my face near a flawless white blonde beam, I momentarily stand at attention. As expected, I feel the familiar surge of scorched memories travel the length of my spine. Heat rushes from my nose down to my hamstrings and back up to the front of my brain in a fraction of a second...and with closed eyes I see what I was hoping for, what I knew was coming, and what always appears when my beak is filled with the thickety reek of hardwoods; I see the house my father built when I was sixteen years old.
We never lived in it, which is a somber story in itself, full of loss and heartache and dreams coming undone; but before things went sideways, we had a summer of great anticipation thinking that we were going to have a new home, a fresh outlook. We had ninety odd sunrises and sunsets where we inhaled sealants, flooring, sheetrock and wood and, collectively, it smelled like hope.
Pushing back from the memory, faintly dazed and embarrassingly wrecked, I walked back to my husband and cried.
He's accustomed to my tears. He knows that olfactrilly speaking, I'm regularly in search of punishment.
I smell lumber.
I hold onto chain link fences in hot weather and then pull my hands off and huff the fumes of childhood hopping where I snuck into other people's swimming pools, lonely and closed for the season school athletic fields, and forbidden cordoned-off parking lots.
If I cut myself I calculatingly inhale the coppery tang of the wetness before the bandage gets applied.
I wear my mother's perfume from 1982, right before things went south with my parents. To me, it smells like funeral flowers.
This is why I don't enjoy e-books; I need a whiff of a century old library as I shelter myself in the story.
I can identify your brand of tobacco even though I don't smoke.
I know exactly where, within miles and miles of a familiar patch of woods, I am planted based solely on the smell of the verdant moss, how drenched and loamy and dank the roots of the heady oaks are, and whether or not a wayward teenaged troupe has recently sparked a celebratory bonfire.
Give me the low tide fetidness of the ocean with its decaying driftwood, stranded salty jellyfish and the reeking briny algaeic funk of seaweed.
The white towel of my love after he's mopped it across the back of his neck, post treadmill, gets pressed against my chest like our lost baby in whose crown I want to ensepulcher my grief.
Today I am bathing in self-imposed sadness. I am low-spirited. I am wallowing and I am languishing. I know how to feel some peace, though. I will grab some potent Vicks Vaporub which, with a single draw, transports me to early childhood and a set of doting and worried parents who teamed up to slather it on my collarbone when I was sick. I will hurriedly twist open its green plastic cap, which in woebegone days used to be a beautiful midnight colored metal.
And
I
breathe in,
I
breathe out.
