Rediscovering Scents: The Journey to Retrain My Nose
Your TKG NewsLetter. Rediscovering SCENTS - we are talking about the nose. Though I should have more sense! A walk-about out into the fields after harvest. And the farm. Always the farm.
All of our senses are multi sensual. Sens-u-all. Not one of our five senses is one dimensional. When you look at a red watering can you will see that you need to use more than one shade of red to paint that pot onto a canvas.
When you take a sip of chicken soup you should taste the chicken, the chilli, the coconut milk, the cilantro, the roasted garlic separately on your tongue.
It is the same with smells. We are smelling a medley all day long. Or we should be.
But what if your sense of smell stopped working. Damn Covid wiped it out.
Let’s be clear. I am not a scientist. But I have lived in this body of mine for 64 years. Sixty four very busy years I might add. So I feel like I am quite familiar with this body. I quite like it actually. This body. Attached.
And losing one of my senses was a blow. A low blow.
But I intend to get my sense of smell back.
When we are trying to recover a scent, let’s use coffee as an example, it is not the simple aroma of coffee. The coffee scent is rich with other smells, like chocolate, or caramel, or a burnt note (when the coffee machine was set too hot) or the scent of sun, the scents from the water we use, the packaging, the cup.
Each smell is a combination of many scents.
When I could smell well (love how that rhymes) I smelt in what I can only describe as bar codes. I talk about it a little here. I saw the smells in my mind. Though my mind has no eyes so I guess my over active brain dreamed up an image; a black and white barcode. It is hard to describe but it went a little like this. A smell would arrive. Some parts of the smell were wider and fuller and deeper. Others were thin and wiffly though intensely important to the overall aroma. I would sniff the first top note and then my nose would reach in and line the different scents up in thin or wide lines around it. Categorising them in a way. Labeled and coded I would think.
I could smell a persons clothing, or skin and know where they had been, who they had been with, what they had been drinking or eating. If they spent the day in air-conditioning. If they were on medications. Smokers were very difficult to be near. Artificial perfumes overloaded my brain. But most unsettling, I could smell what they had been doing and often with whom. (And yes, this was a little uncomfortable). The world is heaving with scent. The home. Wind. The barn. Buses. Wild animals trails. Trains. Approaching storms. Fishing boats. Planes. The beach. The kitchen. I always choose a seat far from the toilets on a plane! I hate artificially scented candles or bathroom sprays or laundry conditioners their scents are too big. Too bossy. Artificial laboratory scent has no nuance. No barcode.
We all smell all this stuff by the way. My brain just gave it back to me clearly labeled and in a visual form. Does yours?
Natural scents arrive loosely mingled together and on a rainy morning it was pure delight to stand still on the step and untangle the scents from each other and see them line up in my mind. A good sense of smell is useful with wine and coffee and cooking but also useful with animals. By reaching for a broad whiff when entering the barn we can decipher illness, or approaching calving or dehydration or a runny bottom. We can smell where an animal is or where a critter is hiding.
Well. I can’t do that anymore, that bad bout of Covid in NZ hit me like a brick in the head and my consistently strong sense of smell flicked off.
And I really miss that incredible sense.
So. I need to train my nose to do it again. Smell again. I give myself smell training every day. I stop and go still and smell intentionally trying to tease out each note of a scent, name it and assign it a bar in my smelling barcode memory. I am trying for only three notes per smell for the moment.
And I am also training myself on big strong scents like lavender, orange oil, coffee (of course) - if I had a bed of roses I would be using that scent, too.
When I train working dogs; I train them for five minutes, five times a day. So this is what I am doing with my olfactory retraining. Five minutes, five times a day with a different scent each time. I am using essential oils mostly, left over from my soap making.
I would love one of those box sets of small vials or little jars, filled with scent and labeled and set into a case. The various scents are used to help wine makers and tasters identify and name individual notes in wine. LIke cucumber and grass and daisies and sun. It is called a “le nez du vin” set, which translates to “the nose of a scent”. I need one for the retraining of my nose. But filled with ordinary scents like earth and leaves and ants and mold and water on hot stones. And rain.
I want all the smells back. Pungent scents. Aromatic scents. Fragrant scents. Nuanced. Layered. Vibrant or unfocussed. That lingering solitary smell arriving on the edge of my mind, like a slip of a sound, a shimmer. Scented as though out of the corner of my eye. These are the scents that tell us the most about our surroundings. These are the scents I am missing.
Losing the sense of smell is a cautionary tale. And a challenge.
If I can embark on a self made program to retrain my nose to collect smells and wake up my olfactory nerve into proper delivery and shake my hippocampus awake to receive and translate those smells into words and images and bars in a barcode, then we can all retrain ourselves to anything.
Maybe not to smell clearly again. Maybe you already smell well.
Maybe you need to retrain your palette to do without artificial flavorings.
Maybe we need to retrain our vocabulary so we don’t need quite such a long pause before we find the right word.
Maybe we need to retrain ourselves to be braver. More hopeful. More active. More intellectually muscular.
Maybe I need to relearn all the names of all my favorite plants from the hemisphere where I was born.
Maybe we need to retrain ourselves to be awake to every moment of this precious life.
When writing a description or a dream as clear as a memory, we often reach for all five of our senses. Do this often. Name them. Repair those senses and use them. Think like a farmer; lean on the gate and observe, using all your senses, squint your eyes, lift your nose, turn your head, name and code what arrives then decide on your course of action.
By keeping our senses well fed and well watered we will make good decisions.
Do you think?
And now I would really love a hot freshly ground coffee in a thin ceramic mug with freshly foamed raw milk from a cow.
The Walk-About
The Farm
Look your dinner in the eye.
It is going to be a tough week on the farm.
The hogs and white chickens and turkeys go off to the local abbatoirs to be processed. Killed to be clear. I guess. Though it goes against our cultural conditioning to face the fact that if we eat meat then an animal must die for that to happen. We suppliers of your meat make sure to make this particular protein into neat little innocuous, appealing packages for (family) to consume without causing emotion.
But raising animals for food is emotional. It should be. We should care. I have a theory that if we all were to look our dinner in the eye then overconsumption and the waste of meat and food would be eliminated.
I thank all my animals and birds individually as I load them into the trailers. I touch each one for you and say thank you. This is important to do. So - this week when the white chickens and the hogs and the turkeys go to market is a hard one. And it should be. If it wasn’t I would be a shit farmer.
Once again - this is a farm not a zoo.
Though to be fair when the summer animals have left it feels like a bit of a zoo.
The Fields
The harvesters have been and gone.
The Cows
Just wandering about as usual.
Jude and FreeBee
This is FreeBee eating his pumpkin.
Tima and Wai
Tima is allowed out of her little paddock now that the corn has been harvested. And guess where she heads every morning!
The PopPops
Those piglets!! They have a nice backyard now and are settled for the winter.
The Ducks
The Layers
The Canines
The Felines
Lazy cats.
I have said a lot already today so I am going to leave you now.
Comment if you can. Like if you like. And Share.
No matter how you choose to subscribe - thank you for reading. I appreciate you. I see you.
Have a gorgeous Sunday/Monday.
Celi
I have run out of time! I post this at midday on Sunday and it is 3 minutes to! Typical. Watch out for my Notes on substack as I recommend the writing during the week.
I love the idea of “smell barcodes.”
I also appreciate your call to be more intentional with our senses, not just in the context of smell but in how we experience life in general.
Thank you Cecilia.
I think I shared with you that I discovered I had an 'enhanced sense of small' after my covid. it was awful and lasted about a year. these were all very bad smells, completely made up by my brain connecting to my sinuses which must have been impacted by the covid. the doc who I had an appointment with said she had it also, with different smells, and she is treating many people who either lost of have the enhanced false smell thing going on.