Nose Knows

I work with a woman who has a habit of smelling everything. She has a nose that picks up traces of things I can't even register; she smells deeply where I smell nothing. Her olfactory skills constantly make self-conscious me worry that I may smell bad. Eh well. I started thinking about smells last week, when I was listening to Lucinda Williams and the song “Essence” came on the iPod. I started to think about the word and its definitions, because I actually do stuff like that. According to Websters, essence has three definitions:

(1) the distinctive characteristic of something
(2) the inward nature or true substance of something
(3) a liquid containing a substance in concentrated form, as a perfume.

To me, smell is the most underrated of our senses, because smells capture memories better than the four others. Smells have the ability to time travel to very specific moments and call them out. For example, when I smell a cedar trunk, I am five years old and it's my favorite hide-and-seek spot, sitting on the really ugly quilt and itchy Hudson Trader blankets that filled it. When I smell a cedar trunk I am warm, adventurous, itchy, scared and mildly diabolical. When I smell pipe tobacco I'm sitting in a red woolen rocking chair with my Boppa and his lap dog and I am safe. Smells have an emotive quality that astounds me. They communicate in a language so intimate and infinite its almost anybody's guess but everyone speaks it.

I got to smell the ocean the other day. I realized that in the past two months the only time I've left Buncombe County was to drive to and from the Charlotte airport. Not really what one would call a great adventure, and really I needed some adventure in my life. So three of us went and smelled the ocean for a day. What a smell it is, isn't it? It is somehow this amalgamation of teeming life and blatant decay, of danger, comfort, salty and sweet. The ocean's essence permeates everything in which it comes in contact. It restores and takes life. We were joking about what heaven would smell like (because I'll be sorely disappointed in there are no smells in heaven. I'd be very bored) and here are the things on my list:

• Freshly washed puppies
• Freshly mowed grass
• One of my ex-boyfriends (seriously, that guy smelled AMAZING. I just sniffed him all the time)
• Hemlocks in the Adirondacks
• The ocean in Maine
• Another ex-boyfriend (incidentally, they both had the same first name but very different smells)
• Freshly washed babies
• Caramelized onions (I actually hate onions, but love the smell of them cooking)
• Campfires
• A true love first thing in the morning
• The air right after a big rainstorm
• The first cold day in the fall when the frost has a smell
• GAIN detergent
• Old books
• Freshly baked bread

There is an essence to things living and it is smell. Then there is the essence of people, the scent that is both viciously carnal and wholly new that breathes life into something already living and adds a completely different view of them. Pheromones are said to dictate who we are attracted to and who we aren't, so smell isn't that strange—it's instinctual what it does for us. My pheromones apparently pick those that end up breaking my heart. My pheromones suck. As I think of heaven as smells, I asked two of my friends what hell would smell like if it were three smells. I had one friend say, “The breath of a man first thing in the morning that you just realized you do not love” and that broke my heart, because that truly is hell. Well, that and dentists offices. And urine. What would hell smell like if it had three smells for you? What about heaven? I am curious, which means none of you will answer this question.