Making scents of life

Making scents of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 16, 2013

We were trapped. Sealed in a lift that was ripe with the stench of unwashed human. That malodorous cloud was a parting gift from the previous occupant. We spluttered out at the 9th floor. ‘What was that stink?’ asked my 12-year-old. ‘That,’ I said, ‘was some serious B-O.’

I can bring to mind a handful of occasions, (mostly in aeroplanes) when I have flinched at the smell of another human being. Yet the faint milky sweetness of a baby’s head is intoxicating. I want to drink it in, inhale the newness and neediness of life. The musky scent of my husband is the smell of belonging – me to him – comforting and arousing at the same time.

At my supermarket, it’s frustrating trying to sniff out a new season’s peach when peachiness has been turned frigid by cold storage. I see why people are embracing farmers markets as an open-air feast for the senses. A home grown tomato smells of the sun. It’s a revelation after shop-bought tomatoes whose scent has been all but snuffed out.

Sometimes it takes a conscious effort to be reacquainted with the persuasive power of scent. Coming home minus kids from school this morning I stopped in the park, underneath the Norfolk Island pines. What does the wind smell like? I’d never considered it before. My nose could detect something familiar and then, with a rush, I realised what it was: I was smelling the heat rising off grass sprinkled with needles. Warm currents of air on their way to 39 degrees that had sucked up the scent of pine and grass clippings. I could distil the essence of that February morning far more by the smell of the wind than by the sight of the big pines or the familiar screeches of the white cockatoos. I tried all morning to recall the scent of that warm breeze, but the memory faded as the day wore on.

Smells are the easiest and hardest things to remember. My grandmother’s white Morris 1100 retained its new car bouquet for 20 years. Try as I might, I cannot bring to mind that favourite scent. My brain offers me visual reminders instead – the cherry-red of the vinyl  bench seats and my nanna at the wheel with her pink powdered cheeks and a harlequin-print polyester dress. Perhaps smell doesn’t like to work alone. Perhaps memories of smells erode with time or are muddied by subsequent layers of living.

The 20th century French writer Marcel Proust believed some memories are imprinted more firmly than others by their smell. He wrote of a man overwhelmed by his sudden ability to recall, in vivid detail, the madeleine cakes he once dipped in his tea as a child. My grandmother’s Morris is my Proustian biscuit. Except I’ve never quite managed to capture the essence of that delicious scent.

The internet and smart phones have eroded my senses.The Net has changed the way I shop for a birthday cake and how I order the frangipani for the back  garden. Where once I was driving to the patisserie and swooning over the thick buttery fumes of so much cake, or gliding around a nursery exhilarated by the perfume of so many blossoms, now I am pressing keys on a computer with my sense of smell in hibernation. No need for it: at my desk I am scentless. (‘Senseless more like it’, suggests the cynic from the sofa.) I tell you, technology smells of nothing. It is sterile.

Unlike junk e-mail, odours cannot be fended off with a delete button. They don’t wait to be invited and they like to hang about. (Bad smells have no manners.) Prawn heads in the sun, too much fresh paint, big Jersey cows trampling their manure at the Royal Show. As a child, I wished the reek of so much animal wouldn’t overpower the delicate waft of spun sugar from the fairy floss stand.

I’m fussy about smells so it’s just as well I’m woman, not dog. If the sniffing power of a beagle is one hundred thousand times greater than mine, no wonder he loves to jam his snout against the rear of every dog he meets. That must be the same kind of rush I’d get riding the Magic Mountain at Disneyland. (Only a canine lover can stand the smell of wet dog.)

For me, the most perplexing smell comes as I open my front door after holidays away from home. In those first few seconds of walking inside I suddenly register what my home-life must smell like. It’s as though my nose needs reminding which house it belongs to. For a split second, I am a stranger to my own scent. And then it vanishes, replaced by the familiar sound of my footsteps down the hall.

There are scents I could drown in, float away on, never tire of: the smell of a child’s warm breath as you carry him asleep from the car to his bed, the nape of my daughter’s neck after her bath. Gingerbread baking before Christmas. Peeling oranges, the fragrance of my mum’s Oil of Olay as she braided my hair before school. These are the smells precious to a life. Perhaps memory has designed these smells to be recalled piecemeal, never whole. I can think of no finer way to protect their potency.