The Power Of Smell

When I opened my apartment door this afternoon I was greeted by the fragrance of fresh air with a soft undertone of caramelized onions and garlic.  Yesterday I cooked chili beginning with chopped onions and garlic cooking in olive oil (to be honest it was a budget grade of olive oil mixed with canola.  Gourmet on a budget, Gentle Reader!)  I was surprised that I could still smell the onion and garlic, but none of the other ingredients (tomato, chili powder, cheese).  I was even more surprised that instead of feeling bothered by the odour that I found it immediately pleasant and pleasurable.  Then I was transported to my youth, when I was a young man in my early twenties happily cooking, beginning almost all my savoury dishes with onion and garlic frying in oil.

Only smell could have signalled for me such a profound recollection.  Our sense of smell is actually our most primal and powerful sense.  It is also our most underestimated.  Who among us has never been knocked almost unconscious by the stench that someone just left following a very recent bowel movement in a public washroom?  Who hasn't been moved to states of near transcendent rapture in a rose garden, or a lavender field, or perhaps in an orange or lemon grove?  This time of year, as winter is well in its delicate transition into spring, the heavy, heady sweet and citrusy fragrance of Daphne fills the air in some neighbourhoods.  In the spring it will be lilacs.  In the summer, the linden trees.

Right now the slightly charred, vaguely sweet scent of baking potato slices is filling my small apartment.  This afternoon it was chocolate from when I made from scratch a pot of cocoa.  After dinner as I peel an orange the bold sweet fragrance of the peel and the fruit will intoxicate me like good brandy.

Some odours are downright disgusting.  I will not repeat the aforementioned but who has not been left nearly retching by the intense body odour of the unwashed man on the bus?  Or the intense cheap cologne that some men believe will be just the elixir to seduce the unattainable young women, failing to realize that they are making them even more unattainable.  How about second hand smoke?  Car exhaust?  I could go on.

We are bombarded by scent, odour, fragrance and stench.  Some is so subtle that it almost always escapes us, except, we are always unconsciously responding to one another's scent.  This could make or break a deal, a date, a job interview: not clothes, appearance, polished resume, or visual appeal, but the way we smell.  And we don't even know it.

I remember the smell of my mother.  It was a curious mix of fragrance, soft sweat, and house cleaner.  It was uniquely my mother's odour.  Now and then I will smell something similar and suddenly I am in that place, that primal sense of my mother that will never be repeated since she died twenty-five years ago.  Sometimes on a summer day, in the evening, the dry sweet odour of dry grass and road dust returns me again to my grandfather's farm in August.