Losing My Scent

 In a moment of rare intimacy my mother told me what she'd liked most about my father was his smell.  As an older teenager at the time I remember thinking I'd so rarely been close enough to him to experience it, but I knew what she meant.  Of course, all curious children open and sniff the bottles and toiletries left on bathroom sink-tops.  Our default father-gift was aftershave; his clothing taste was difficult and specific-- many unworn ties hug in his closet which smelled of nothing I can recall-- the faint ghost of tennis ball cans which lined the top shelf.   So yes, there was Old Spice but that was generic/manly.  Even music and schoolteachers used it.  

We all discover on the most basic biological level the chemistry of smell and how it figures not just in nostalgia and romance, but attraction and attachment.  Like the Proustian Madeleines, the faintest aura of patchouli can send me into vivid moments of girl-crushes and beach-passion.  So the harbinger of Corona Virus-- total anosmia-- was not only disorienting but like some kind of emotional theft.  At the beginning of my illness, this was not a recorded symptom and the medics I spoke with shrugged me off.  I could stick my nose in a bottle of bleach and register nothing.  Not to mention the altered, distorted sense of taste; my beloved morning coffee was bitter and harsh.  Hmmm, they said.

Gradually I retrieved some of my skill; I practiced in the spring gardens of Central Park, identifying flowers and nature. Oddly, the 'nice' smells came quickly while foul odors went undetected.  I could change diapers without flinching.  Ten months since the illness, I still have trouble smelling burning food while colognes and perfumes are particularly vivid and singular.  Frankly it's as though I have someone else's smell-- not mine.  The Goldilocks sense of 'who's been sniffing in my nose?'  I am also my own doppelgänger-eater.  Most sophisticated food is now 'back' but still my coffee palate is off; things are boring.  And yet.. fruit... is amazing.  It's possible the components of taste required to appreciate grapes are untampered, whereas experiencing some subtle smoked meat dish is still scrambled.  I've drawn a parallel between the temporary ravage of the virus and the permanent-- as though we've been deconstructed here and put back together in a slightly different order.  The mechanism of these vaccines spooks me a little too... I read Watson and Crick way back-- the way the strands proofread and repair... they scared us into believing psychedelics could unhinge this process... how about these meds? Not to take a political stance... but to consider the biological aftermath of covid-- well, I feel rearranged.  

On top of the grievous human losses that resulted from a complete failure to understand a new illness, we are left with these altered realities... our societal loneliness and fear, lack of trust, isolation, and this persistent longing my friends describe for the life we had 'before',  Who are we, without our little life-dioramas and stages and interactions-- our flirtations with the bartender, random meetings on a train, nostalgic triggers that bring the artistic of us to creative brinks, to inspiration?  

At the end of her life, my mother rarely left her bedroom.  It had a certain smell, the way old people almost uniformly biologically secrete a documented identifiable chemical.  I loved my mother so much I missed even that smell, when she passed.  It eclipsed so many of the others-- except the Chanel perfume I used to inhale to bring her 'ghost' into the room when I was lonely and she was, as usual, 'out'.  I'd post myself in her closet, between dresses, and wrap them around my head.  There it was.  

While I was recovering, these months... I've thought often about my girlhood dogs-- the Retrievers whose heads smelled to me like freshly-baked bread.  Like my mother, the men in my life had their own scent-- this affected all relationships and was inextricably attached to each.  My favorite of all smelled of the sea; I've written about him-- he died long ago, and abused his body... but still, I could tell he'd come into the room by the mixed woody perfume of forest and the beach... it was like a poem, just to close my eyes and know.  

Like all creatures who die young, we never get to replace their legend with the older, less fragrant version.  My mother was quite demented at the end and I'm sure recalled my father's scent with all her being, even though he was old and mean and grouchy, shared her room with the 'cloud' of the aging, and passed away. Like all of her dementia-dreams, things were beautiful and young-- at least at the end.  Having this parosmia, as they call the scrambled sense of smell, it reminds me that I've been altered as a woman-- that I no longer have the attraction or desire I once had, or the capacity to inspire.  I can only use memory to paint, to compose, to write.  I rarely if ever take a selfie-- the physical reality seems, like my sense of smell, a little disconnected from who I am or might be... from my people who have passed, from my past, from my self... I suppose it's a matter of time until my memory fades, loses accuracy, identifies less... sheds  the present with the past, as we all walk a little more cautiously into this future.