olfactory

I really enjoyed Sofija Stefanovic's essay "Smells Like Home" in the New York times a few days ago. She talks about how smells -- good or bad -- can take you to another place. For Stefanovic, who migrated to Australia as a child from the former Yugoslavia, the childhood smells of Belgrade can become like Proust's madeleine though totally unrecognized when she was in Yugoslavia.

I'm not sure my childhood had such evocative smells but today was an olfactory, or potentially very smelly, day. When I pulled on my jeans, I noticed the smell of the laundry in Turin. We were in Italy in March and decided to use a laundry rather than try to figure out the washer in our airbnb apartment. I don't normally use scented detergent so it was strange to whiff the Italy-laundered jeans and totally splendid to think of Turin.

Out for my morning walk. It's earlier than usual because I was heading out early to an ARLIS/NA Upstate New York chapter meeting in Corning. I was walking along in my morning quasi-meditative fog when I'm brought up short by the skunk just a few paces ahead of me. I crossed the street and he slunk off into the brush. Phew.

I got to the chapter meeting and one of my colleagues admitted that she was in the process of moving and had had trouble finding clean clothes to put on and hoped she wasn't smelly. Nope, you're fine.

Our chapter likes to do silent auctions at our chapter meetings. I don't know if it was the skunk, Proust, laundry detergent, or just the crazies but I bid on the little box of scented soaps. All the way home, the car interior was creating a whole new, very fragrant memory.