The on and off switch has a mind of its own

January 9

I had most of a day of relief - the smell vanished. I inhaled deeply all day, marveling at how wonderful a source of happiness such a simple thing as smelling fresh air is. Then of course it came back, disappointingly, towards the end of my work day. Driving home, along the quiet sweeping road from Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands, keeping an eye out for quail, deer, and the occasional coyote, I figured I might try to redefine the scent mentally, associate it with more welcome scents and train myself to think of it that way. So, as I said, it's made up of an acrid tone, an indefinable medicinal scent, an indistinct, aerosol-like scent, and a tinge of unpleasant sweetness. For the acrid scent I mentally substituted hickory charcoal embers, still glowing. For the medicinal scent I thought of a pine forest in springtime instead of a hospital room. For the aerosol scent I imagined a cooking spray flavored with virgin olive oil. And for the icky sweet smell, I remembered a perfume I loved, Oscar de la Renta, in the days when I still wore perfume. I became a perfumed woman cooking with olive oil over a hickory flame outdoors in a pine forest. Not so bad.

But still, it's unsettling to be compromised at a scent level. As I drove I started thinking about scents in my life, and suddenly I remembered a wonderful phenomenon that occurred to me a number of times over a period of years. I could be standing in a concrete parking lot surrounded with nothing but cars, or driving down highway 5 with only empty plains on either side, or sitting by the salty ocean, and suddenly I would be engulfed by the smell of roses. It would be so strong that I would instinctively look around, as though I might find an acre of rose garden thriving near the surf at Keyhoe Beach or along the edge of the feed lots at Harris Ranch. It made me happy, and I felt privileged, as though singled out for an unearned moment of grace. It was marvelous. I also thought about my cat Buster, who always smells delicious to me (until now, when he smells only like It, the smell). I pick him up from his walk outside, and he usually smells like dinner rolls fresh from the oven, or really good butter cookies. Sometimes he smells like sage or thyme, and sometimes like tobacco, prompting me to imagine that he probably has (as, I suspect, all indoor/outdoor cats do) about 12 other homes where they love him and cuddle him, and where he sleeps in gardens or on other feathery beds. Couldn't all these illogical scent experiences belong in some respect to the same condition? Only the scents in the past were all welcome, even magical, whereas this scent is simply annoying.

It's gone again today, after having morphed last night, while I was browsing at Green Apple Books, into something akin to an overripe cantaloupe, then the faint smell of fresh sawdust, and then just dusty air. Who knows what it'll be tomorrow.