Free Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett Page A

she felt detached from reality, as if she were adrift in time and space. And her depression seemed to be deepening.
    The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wasn't writing about depression when he confided in his memoir
Speak, Memory,
"I do not believe in time." But depression does teach one how tenuous is the sensory convergence that keeps a person believing, intuitively and without question, in a concrete and well-integrated version of reality. When that faith is eroded by a sensory breakdown, the rebuilding process can take years.
    As my days passed without smell, I lost faith in both clock and calendar. My life was a puzzle that had been shoved off a table and onto the floor. It lay in pieces. I could reassemble it—it would just take time, whatever that was. Each piece was small, unrecognizable, and insignificant, but like the individual odors that make up a smell, each was programmed to contribute something to the whole, something essential and precious that I'd misplaced but would recover, the way you can unexpectedly stumble on a lost necklace or misplaced keys. You believed the keys were gone for good when in fact they were right there, within your grasp. The keys always show up. The pleasure of routine would come back the way feeling comes back after you've sat on your haunches too long and your feet have fallen asleep.
    And yet ... how do I measure the emotional cost when I realize I've tasted coffee for the last time? When I know I've taken my last stroll through the garden just to smell the fragrance of thyme that's released with every step and the roses that always entice first my nose and then my touch with their lurid perfume? When I realize I've smelled the last whiff of my grown-up daughter's drugstore-bought scent? (Never again will I suggest she tamp it down a bit because it makes my nose itch.)
    What happens when I'm no l onger held captive by smells powerful enough to take me far away in time and space? To my kindergarten classroom (oilcloth and crayons). To the state fair (cotton candy and horse barns). To the North Woods, where I finally got to know my true self by getting in tune with nose-tickling lichens and liverworts, ferns and fungi, and the tall white pines and the long shoreline of Lake Superior, with its pebbled beaches, sculpted driftwood, and the seaweed that always reminded me of a mermaid's silk tresses, sending up its smell of unknowable realms below as it swished against the sun-dappled stones at the water's edge.
    What happens when physical intimacy is oddly arid because I can't even smell my husband?
    How is one supposed to feel about a disorder whose only symptom, once the fake smells give up, is no sensation at all?

9. Tasting the Holidays
    O NE MORNING as the holidays loomed I awoke as usual in a vile stench and was (as usual) startled when the toothpaste set off a defensive dead-fish counterblast. My tongue tried to slither into the back of my mouth. Determined that Christmas would be business as usual, I made the annual holiday pilgrimage to the bakery across town that sells an anise-flavored Swedish rye bread and pastries to die for. The best part is lingering outside to admire the gingerbread village in the bakery window—all candy-c ane roofs and gumdrop doorknobs—while catching hints of the olfactory pleasures waiting inside every time a customer enters or departs in a cloud of warm, sweetened air.
    A tinkling bell announced my arrival; this time I hadn't even glanced at the window before crossing the threshold. Inside the crowded store, my nose reacted with dismay. There was no mistaking that the better the actual smell, the worse its surrogate. Other notoriously stinky places flooded my consciousness—the old Waldorf paper plant that ground newspapers into pulp and was finally shut down because of its stench; the oil refinery that had burned to the ground, incinerated by its own disgusting smell; and the Landmark brewery, which smelled exactly like burning toast soaked in stale