Friday, April 22, 2005

Sniffles, part III

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.