A candle sitting on my nightstand carries the scents of New England: cedar and balsam, which brings a touch of nature to the indoors, regardless of the season. Balsam reminds me of a mountain forest, while cedar reminds me of the chest my mother used for storage once upon a time. Scents are unique: the smell of rain, of fresh mowed grass, of a farm, of freshly fallen snow, of leaves in the fall and all the smells inherent in each season throughout the year.
In Deerfield, Massachusetts, the scents wafting from the home of Yankee Candle infuses the air with a variety of scents. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, the smell of chocolate fills the air and the senses. In Vermont, the smell of maple sap boiling infuses the air, especially in the spring. In Boulder, Colorado - once you get past the smells coming from the Celestial Seasonings plant - the dominant smell is peppermint amid the crisp snow. The frozen water smells pure, as if still trapped in the clouds hanging just overhead. The sun glints off the Rocky Mountains, their iron musk mixes with mountain pine.
A sprig from a creosote bush infuses the steam in my shower stall with notes of the western Grand Canyon - tarry, resinous, bitter, but rich - carried in a paper bag from the desert Southwest during a recent visit, pre-Covid of course. More sudden than fossil or feather or driftwood burl on a desk, the sprig's scent conjures another place and time, jump-starting memory like satiny wildflowers chanced upon between the pages of an old book.
Call it scent nostalgia, a form of aromatherapy for the soul longing for a sense of place and purpose. Outside, leaden winter prevails with the dearth of smells symptomatic of the season's deprivations. There, the olfactory monotone of old snow reigns supreme. Vapors carry scent molecules that move more freely and in greater quantity in warm humidity than in cold, dry air. But knowledge of the facts does not make such absences easier to bear.
An odor is a chemical molecule light enough to be swept around by the environment. Scents travel through air or underwater, before ultimately tripping sensors in our noses - known as olfactory neurons.
We are predominantly visual beings, underestimating - or taking for granted - what the nose knows until a head cold or exotic virus (like Covid-19) leaves us not blind, not deaf, not mute, but - what? There is simply no word (or solace) for impairments of smell, which my friends experienced as a result of the pandemic. Moreover, our descriptions of scents lacks refinement, suggesting disinterest, a focus elsewhere, or inadequate training.
Unlike the rest of sensory input, scent impulses bypass the thalamus, flitting straight to the brain's centers for emotion, decision-making, memorization and navigation, where they coalesce into "odor maps." Scents can teleport us across space and time. Strengthened by recollections as much as by Earth's components, I am deeply inhaling their essences, trying to safeguard each one.
Scents ground us in nature's cycles, in death and rejuvenation.
Each scent of a treasured locale evokes an embrace, a friendly hand on the shoulder, at least. I often sense storms before they arrive, or wildfires before they visibly thicken the atmosphere along the mountains. Scents reveal the hidden as much as they recall the nearly forgotten.
For travelers circumscribed by the pandemic, aromas offer the chance to revisit cherished journeys. That can be as simple as savoring the bouquet of a favorite wine, or lighting a scented candle.
But the world of aromas - what writer Harold McGee has dubbed the “osmocosm,” from the ancient Greek word for odor - invites experiences that go beyond fond memories. Aroma can facilitate imaginative journeys across space and time, to places you will never smell in real life, from historic battlefields to the dystopian future of a South Pacific island.
Aroma as mental journey is not a new idea, in particular. Over a century ago, French novelist Marcel Proust inhaled a fresh-baked madeleine that triggered vivid memories of his childhood, describing the experience in “Swann's Way," the first of seven volumes that compose In Search of Lost Time. That experience of aroma-evoked memory became known as the Proust phenomenon, familiar to anyone who has lost track of the present after burying their nose in a box of crayons.
Unlocking the full impact of aroma, in other words, takes more than a smell. For that, you need a story, a philosophy embraced in the scented candle industry, which has been booming in the pandemic. Some candlemakers use stories to conjure places we sorely miss right now.
Imagine that you are standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Your eyes and visual mind dissect the structure, instinctively detecting contours in the marble as the building rises toward the sky. Our noses and olfactory brain areas interpret scents in a similar way.
So, when you are in a garden and you stop to smell the roses, every sniff you make is changing the aroma for someone else. Inhalation creates large, blank pockets of space inside an odor cloud. These voids are known as intermittency, and they are the olfactory equivalent of negative space in a photograph.
Scents are chemical beacons that convey interesting things about the environment. If you have ever caught a whiff of a bakery and turned your head, then you have used smell for navigation. Yet, these smell maps are an overlooked part of everyday human existence, and this bias has bled into how scientists approach our senses.
Unlike signature sounds, scents remain a sadly neglected aspect of place. We take pictures, record waterfalls, seashores or birdsongs, but depend on a spoken or written archive for scents. Scents need the storyteller, the writer, to endure, to blossom, to have their praises sung.
Comments