For all of you who have sent good thoughts toward our very good dog Cosmo, over the past week or the past year or ever:
Thanks.
He’s finally off-leash and uncollared, and he’s chasing squirrels like he always wanted to. His legs don’t hurt him anymore. I just wish we still had him around.
part iii of “stuff that smells.” The first two parts are immediately below. It’s only a total of five items, anyway, it’s not like this is some big list. I just can’t stop yammering about stuff. Except, of course, that now I’m on hiatus for a couple of weeks. See you May 9.
Mothballs: this is an invasive smell. It takes over, kicks other smell’s asses. Nothing else can be smelled when mothballs are on the scene. Unlike some smells I’m used to noticing, these don’t just smell poisonous – they are actually poison, designed to offend living things, to drive them away. Why should these nuggets of deterrent hold any kind of special place for me? Blame Zerline.
My maternal grandmother kept a very clean house, and I got to visit her there every so often as I was growing up. She lived someplace exotic and unusual – Lima, Ohio. For a kid who grew up in LA, Lima was a pretty big change, and an excellent place to do the grandparent thing – high humidity, lightning bugs, vast back lawns that blended together without the benefit of fences… Under my grandparent’s custody I got to play lawndarts late into the creeping evenings, and explored Hog Crick and the whole subdivision, and met girls, and ate sugared cereal each morning in their antiseptic kitchen. And just next to that blindingly clean kitchen was the laundry room, with a door to the backyard which I frequently used. And every time I used that laundry-room door, or walked from the dark, perfectly organized, roll-door garage through the laundry room into the main house, or even if I just stood in the part of the kitchen nearest to the laundry room, I could smell the laundry supplies.
That is to say, I could smell the mothballs, because all other odors cowered and bowed before those fragrant crystals. Northwest Ohio is an area prone to moths in the warmer months, and there was no way that Zucky was going to allow them to take advantage of her hospitality with their filthy multiple legs and germ-ridden hairy thoraxes. So, she mothballed stuff. You could notice it all throughout the house, but in the laundry room it was particularly intense.
The smell of mothballs cleared my head; it felt cool in the summer heat, almost refreshing. When I smelled it, I was reassured of some very important things: that there was shelter and safety, even from a welcome and welcoming heat; that order prevailed in the world; that I could not go far astray before being brought back to a place where my welfare – and that of my clothes – was paramount. And even now, catching the occasional whiff of camphor in a supermarket or hiding in the bottom of a long-neglected drawer in an unfamiliar house, I am called back to Lima and a place where synthetic death turned out to be a decent analogue for the best things in life.
I still use my big honkin’ nose as a key exploratory tool, drinking in scents and smells and even stinks, learning where I am and what’s here with me in an intense, multifaceted way. Smell is actually a tactile sensation – the molecules that carry the scent lodge physically in the sinuses and send signals upstairs about what has been thus acquired. But that’s an oversimplification. Odor, scent, olfaction – the way this sensation touches me is worlds beyond anything my skin can take in. I’m not saying I don’t care to feel things on the surface; feeling things on the surface is great, as far as it goes. But to touch me the way it really counts, for me to feel sensations deep below my skin and into my soul, give me a little something to sniff. Lodge the scent in my mind, and you’ll have my undivided attention, Potentially, for the rest of my life.
smells that touch my memory: part I was yesterday. part III is tomorrow. then I get a short hiatus. oh yes I can. don’t take that tone of voice with me. do you want me to turn this blog around and go back home right now?
Electric motor: there’s a peculiar tang in the air that I associate with a certain class of household-grade electric motors. It’s almost sour, almost sweet – an intensely artificial smell, but somehow comforting to me. Perhaps it’s the smell of a household robot. In my home growing up, it was the smell of mom’s Sunbeam electric hand mixer, a smell that meant she was doing something good: cookies, probably, or maybe a cake. This meant I would most likely soon enjoy not only a tasty dessert, but also a more immediate harvest of rich mixing bowl gleanings. I’d stand by the kitchen counter, sunlight streaming into the room, the ingredients gleaming as one by one they were incorporated into some bliss-inducing synthesis, and beneath and around it all, that curious electrical scent. When I encountered similar kinds of motors emitting similar odors in non-kitchen environments, such as power drills or some plug-in children’s toys, my mouth has literally watered when that smell of warm insulation and whirring dynamos reached my nostrils. It seems technology has left me behind on this one, though; newer motors don’t seem to make the same yummy smell. Sometimes, though, I still run into an old vacuum or sander that smells like the promise of cookie dough when I turn it on. In such cases, the turn-on is mutual.
Creosote: it’s that bitter-smelling black stuff on phone poles and pier pilings, a hydrochemical smell, distilled from tar and impervious to the elements. Yet when it gets in the air around me, I’m sent back to a time when, though some things were not as I’d have wanted them, I was too naive to think ill of my circumstances. I was six, in England, effectively friendless and culturally adrift. Yet sometimes the kids in my block of flats (as the brits so charmingly called it) got together to cavort and carouse as best we could in that quiet time with the limited means at our disposal. We ran around and kicked stuff in the street, threw horse chestnuts at each other, antagonized insects and generally experienced a bit of life free from adult supervision. These breaks in the generally overcast tedium of my life were precious and I knew it. And as a general rule, they tended to be accompanied by the smell of creosote, which seemed to be in liberal use everywhere all over the city – in streets and on roofs and on anything made of wood and by the barrelful in the brownfields… wherever I seemed to go, the odor of wood mummified in this stygian goop had preceded me there and overtaken the environment. I always arrived to the scent of creosote; it seemed to signal my right to let my guard down and enjoy myself. To me this was never the smell of poison and preservatives. It was the smell of freedom. And sometimes if the whiff hits me right, it still is.
Sycamore and sage: growing up, I spent several of my early summers at a camp up in the Malibu hills. A private road ran inland from the sea up a narrow canyon where they’d built cabins along a few miles of creekbed; my dad had a regular chaplaincy gig there, so I got to know the place pretty well at an early age. The camp was rustic, minimally transforming the wild land on which it stood. A canopy of sycamores shaded much of the area. These are large trees that have bark that peels off in flat chunks, big leaves covered with stiff fuzz, and spherical seedpods that fall apart into hundreds of little pollen darts. The groundcover was mainly poison oak and wild sage, both of which I learned quickly to recognize for opposite reasons – one, because it was beautiful and dangerous; the other, because it was plain but fragrant. The sage and the sycamore together wove a dusty perfume that filled the canyon – and my mind. I sense Malibu mountains in the summer heat whenever this particular combination of sage and sycamore reaches my nostrils – which is reasonably frequently, what with my coastside lifestyle and all. The evocation is much more than mere place and time – it’s an evocation of a state of mind, a time when summer lasted half my life and I never had to worry about money or food. It’s the smell of unlimited potential and a sheltered place from which to grow. I cherish it.
Welcome to Friday and the last of five consecutive essays about, one way or another, the place…
Liquid Refreshment