Read Online Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett - Free Book Online

kitchen to fill a saucepan with water for tea. The weekly gardening column I wrote for the St. Paul paper was due at 4 P.M. It's hard to write about roses when you're engulfed in stench. I'd been putting it off. But now it was crunch time. I headed back upstairs.
    The slamming of doors and the thump-thump-thumping of feet on the staircase startled me back to reality. Cam? Hadn't he left for work yet? He seemed to be taking the stairs two at a time. He appeared in my office doorway. He shoved a smoking saucepan under my nose. "Jesus Christ!" he shouted. I could see that the copper bottom was mostly black—charred, by the look of it—as was the plastic-covered handle. "What do you think you're doing?" Cam asked. (What I was doing was, obviously, not thinking.) "Thank God I forgot my BlackBerry."
    He'd come back home to get it and found the kitchen filled with smoke. He stood there in my office holding a dishtowel to his face to block out the "truly hellacious odor," not yet remembering that, for all I knew, the suffocating stench was jasmine. When that dawned on him, he let fly with another "Jesus Christ," followed by "You're going to have to be more careful. You've stunk up the whole damned house."
    He set the pan on a metal file cabinet and launched into a safety lecture. His voice was biting and accusatory though muffled by a second dishtowel, which had been relieved of its original purpose, protecting his hand from the pan's smoldering handle. The first dishtowel he'd placed on the file cabinet to protect the finish. Even in extremis, my husband is a careful person. Gas leaks, fires escaping the fireplace, the dire consequences of my forgetting to change the kitty litter box were mentioned. Dr. Cushing had been over most of this.
    "Okay, I could care less about the damned kitty litter," Cam said, reading my thoughts, as usual. "How would you feel if the house burned down?"
    I'd be dead, I almost said but didn't. He was going to have "those worthless smoke alarms" replaced. In the meantime, I
must
remember that I did not have a working nose and couldn't fall back on his when he was away. My "total self-absorption," as he put it, could have disastrous effects on others.
    None of it seemed real. Still, he'd touched a nerve: others. "Caroline needs you to be strong," he'd said only the day before. Now I followed my husband downstairs, watched him carry the smoking cauldron out to the trash on his way to work. When he'd been gone five minutes I put another pan of water on the burner. As I waited for the first tiny bubbles to break on the surface, I briefly considered disabling the ignition switches on the four burners, turning on the gas, and asphyxiating myself. Everyone gets colds, suffers indigestion, strains his back, stubs her toe. Not everyone, in fact not a single person I knew ... and so on ... and so on. And then the tape:
I can't smell and I don't know what that means.
    When clinically depressed people say they can't think straight or read or watch TV or make sense out of the simplest recipe, this is what they're talking about. The mind of a depressed person is like a war zone. Not just frightening but very, very noisy. I couldn't shake my irrational thoughts—thought-feelings. I was stuck on the idea that I was slowly but surely coming unglued as I lost my connection to the things I cared so deeply about. The smelly things. Everything. (What
doesn't
have its own distinct fragrance?) Eventually I'd forget who I was. If psychosis didn't get me, clinical depression would.
    I finished my gardening column and sent it off, knowing I'd managed to make a minor chore (putting roses to bed for the winter) sound like a major bore.
Why would any sane person do this?
was the subtext of my grim recital of dos and don'ts.
Who could possibly care?
    After a few minutes I realized I was dwelling on something even grimmer than a grim recital. I could no Conger keep my mind off the countdown: if Dr. Cushing was right, I had very few