The smells of summer

By Bonnie Blodgett

Since losing my sense of smell for nine months, I have become something of a connoisseur of smells that, frankly, I never much noticed before. I won't say that I didn't smell them, or that I didn't love them and rely on them for my emotional well-being. It's just that it never occurred to me that they were there.

Before I lost my smell, if I'd been asked to name my favorite summer smells, I would have consulted my thinking brain, which would have sent me a list of smells recognizable to one and all as summery. The list would begin with lilacs and end with the now-forbidden scent of burning leaves. Much as I love them, these are not the smells whose absence caused me to fear for my sanity when I became anosmic as a result of using an over the-counter nasal spray.

I grew up in the country, around farms. My sister and I were sent outdoors to play every morning by my tough-as-nails mother with clear instructions that we not return until suppertime. Mom said any kid who chose indoors over nature and the freedom to explore and invent and just figure out how to have fun was no better than a hothouse plant. Among the summer smells that got under my young skin were the chlorine coming off a slate terrace baking in the summer heat beside a swimming pool; the smells of thunderstorms and hay bales and dirt of all kinds (wet and dry, loamy and alkaline); the smells of freshly mown grass, pine needles, Band-Aids, barn wood, water rushing over rocks in a streambed, a dog's warm breath, wet socks, grass-stained leather baseballs, and the way, after a hard run, a horse's sweat mingles with manure, leather and wool.

The smell of horses is still a potent aphrodisiac, and all the more intense for the emotional baggage attached to the flesh-and-blood animal my mother bought from a want ad for $200 and transplanted from a comfy stall to a thistle-infested pasture when I was 9. The horse proved not to be the friendly Flicka of my fantasies but an ornery brute driven by a single thought: how to get me off its back. Aptly named Buck, he usually succeeded, and when one such incident left me with a badly fractured right arm, my passion for horses was dealt a near-mortal blow.

Fear of horses was as unthinkable as being labeled a hothouse plant. I refused to accept the loss of all that scent-laden memory. I knew that I would have to reclaim it. And after much Sturm und Drang, I did. When I ride now, there is always an adrenaline spike as the pounding of my horse's hooves sends smells associated with both the joy and the dread of my childhood up into my nostrils. I am reminded how through determination and grit I once got my old self back.

I could do it again.

When I stopped smelling, something -- my tough-as-nails mom speaking from the grave? -- told me to suck it up. Rewire my brain. Learn to replace smell with other sensual triggers. I was reconnecting with music when my sense of smell returned.

Now I'm glad for that nine-month exile to an odorless world. I understand why I am the emotional slave of snowdrifts flecked with mud, stale cigarette butts, and last summer's moldy leaves. For so many years they've meant that the earth is warming up, that soon my nose will be reveling in the scent of my garden shedding its winter coat. I will rake off the marsh hay and the shredded leaves and compost. I will pull up fistfuls of catmint, which for me has become the most beloved of garden odors.

It is not the most ravishing. That would be jasmine or clematis recta. But I didn't grow up with either of these. I did grow up with catmint. The herb reminds me subliminally of other pungent, soapy smelling weeds that I used to tromp through when I was that kid who loved horses. More important, catmint was the smell that convinced me my sense of smell was back after its long absence. Previous hints -- popcorn, dog poop -- were so familiar that I believed I was imagining them.

I couldn't have invented the smell of catmint if I tried. Even after all those years of living with and loving its distinctive odor, it never would have made my list of favorite summer smells. It was too deeply embedded in my limbic system. I would not have thought of it. Smelling is a brain function but it has little direct contact with thinking. Odor molecules enter the brain through the limbic system, home of emotion, memory and olfaction. These three have been working in tandem on behalf of species survival for millions of years. H. sapiens has existed only the tiniest fraction of that time, so we still have a great deal in common with sex- and turf-obsessed lizards, rats, dogs and monkeys. I would argue that feeling and smell are more fundamental to who we are than thinking and (dare I say it?) sight.

A parallel evolution occurs in each one of us from birth to death. Our most intense connection to smell comes in childhood. As we grow up and mature we carry an ever growing burden of knowledge. We become conscious of disappointment and rejection, loss and death. Thinking increasingly interprets and mediates life experiences, while smell goes underground.

Only when you suddenly can't smell after decades of interacting with a scent-infused world do you understand in quite specific terms what's missing from this "reality" you used to believe in without questioning it, that you thought could never change.

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Bonnie Blodgett is the author of "Remembering Smell: A Memoir of Losing--and Discovering--the Primal Sense," published last June. An avid gardener, she publishes an award-winning quarterly for northern gardeners called The Garden Letter and writes the weekly gardening column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

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