It was only a few years ago that I discovered I was a bit of a nose. I should have known, really. My mother and grandmother had such a sense of smell that the house had to be spic and span and deodorized every single day to make it bearable for them to function normally.
If there was so much as a whiff of molding fixture or, god forbid, almost-stale food, they would hunt down the source of that smell and ruthlessly eradicate it and disinfect the area within a mile radius, if they could. They weren’t being hoity-toity or snobbish, they were just wired to react strongly to smells.
I didn’t think I inherited their keen sense of smell until one day, walking home from work, I stopped, feeling physically sick, assaulted by this horrible stench that was as solid to me as a brick wall. It was ever-present, not the kind of stench that one would smell from a pile of manure, for example, or an open sewer. No, it was something that was all over, source undetermined. And the funny thing was, no one seemed to smell it, but me!
When I got home, took a bath and opened my apartment window to let some fresh air in. To my surprise, the stench was still there; not as strong, but it was there, faint, but insistent. I asked my brother if he smelled it. He didn’t. For the next few days, I briefly entertained the thought of going to the doctor to have my nose checked.
That weekend, I went out of town to do some scuba diving. At the outskirts of Metro Manila, my friends and I rolled down the windows. And then I realized. I couldn’t smell it anymore. Not a trace of that faint, foul odor.
I was smelling the overcrowded, cramped human smell of the city. It was such a revelation that for weeks, I experimented going from city to city, district to district, smelling the similarities and differences of each place.
This made obssession with scents and smells different from my mother’s and grandmother’s: I wasn’t concerned so much about smelling only pleasant scents; I was interested in determining how smells change from one place to the next and how it affects me personally. As much as I celebrated beautiful scents — the smell of an old library book, leather seats, a just-bitten apple, simmering hops from a brewery, warm, fresh laundry — I didn’t shun the bad odors, either: wood rot, open sewers, stray dogs, a passing garbage truck.
Sure, it was frequently the bad odors that would get such a reaction from me, but I didn’t readily mask them or run away from them as my mother and grandmother did. I was all about investigating the hows and whys of these smells. Even as a child, I wasn’t afraid of the smelly stagnant pond water; I would poke at the algae that formed at the surface and catch tadpoles with impunity. It was a miracle my mother didn’t give me up for adoption with the stench I must have brought home with me all those summers.
Why I became truly conscious of my sensitive sense of smell only in my twenties, I don’t know. But I have it the way food gourmets can taste a thing once and determine the ingredients. I have a compendium of scents and memories filed away in my head that I can pull up at will for every smell that piques my interest.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do claim to have an innate, maybe inborn, ability to smell more than others. This has made me a frequent browser of scents in department stores and boutiques, and over the years, I’ve smelled every fragrance for every season that was available locally. And I’ve acquired a handful of classic signature scents that I’ve clung to like a co-dependent relationship as well as “flings” that didn’t last very long.
Hopefully, the next few posts will give entertaining insight about the scents I have recently encountered, and the scents I come back to again and again.
