Forgotten Scents
Meet Felipe, my 9-month-old geosmin factory.
A week before returning to Toronto to finish my last year of university, I was walking through the aisles of a stationary store with a friend, when she asked:
“what smell of home will you miss the most in Toronto?”
The day after landing, I laced up my shoes and ran to the trail that traces Yellow Creek. I broke off route, tiptoeing my way around ferns to the riverbank, where I picked up two handfuls of moss covered rocks. Avoiding all main roads, I sprinted back home with my fists full, hiding in the corner of the elevator while darting my eyes away from my inquisitive new neighbors.
The rocks were arranged in a cookie jar, with the lid opened only once a week for 30 minutes, during which Felipe was watered, and I took a deep whiff of the “home” I missed so dearly: the scent of damp, lush trails.
There’s no shortage of other scents that flood back memories from home; the smell of sweaty passengers waiting on a subway platform, the perfumed and chilled breeze of underground shopping malls, or the back-alley blend of cheap cigarettes, yakitori, and kerosene. These all had their Torontonian equivalents, on the TTC, in the Eaton Center, and by service entrance of the izakaya where I worked. While not quite the same, it was comforting to know I could chase these pockets of air scattered across the city, and be transported straight home.
That all came to an abrupt stop two weeks into March, when Ontario was placed under a state of emergency. As the province was put into lockdown, restaurants were closed, flights got cancelled, travel bans were enforced, and all certainty around when I would next smell “home” seemed to disappear overnight. I was left, as a non-essential worker, to spend more time indoors than ever before. With little to differentiate them, days and weeks began to blend into an indistinguishable cycle of zoom calls and non-stop news updates.
My urge to feel the world outside quickly set in. Between Google Maps and YouTube, I had the ability to visually and aurally explore the world from the safety and comfort of my living room. Learning how to cook everything from palak paneer and kaali daal, to shōyu-ramen and katsu-curry from scratch teased back flavours and textures buried deep in my brain. The senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch could be replicated, in some form, within 4 walls, but the same could not be said for smell. Meals provided a brief escape to an altered olfactory landscape, but were quickly interrupted by an industrial grade air conditioning unit.With every passing day, the already-faint scent of the apartment receded back into the walls and floorboards. I had gone from actively chasing the scents of “home”, to barely even noticing the scent of the very home I was in.
Stepping out once a week into an empty city only perpetuated this further. Stuck breathing the muggy air inside my mask, I began to almost miss the most obscure smells of idling TTC buses, sweaty engineers crammed into a common room, and of construction dust wafting its way through the scaffolding outside Queen’s Park. The world outside looked the same, though emptier, sounded familiar, though quieter, felt homely, though somewhat colder, but smelled unrecognizable behind a mask.
Any day now chlorophyll
May rolled around, and for the first time, I was still in Toronto. Countless hours were spent standing by the corner window, watching the sporadic bursts of hail and snow sweep past the building, as my roommate chuckled, saying “promise me, it’ll get warmer”. In any other year, I would be running through the heavy blanket of summer air in Yamashita Park, wishing it was socially acceptable to exercise with even fewer clothes on. Yet here I was, in early May, still needing tights, high-socks, and a windbreaker to brace a short run.
Spring, when it eventually came, hit me like a truck. The humidity of mid-May brought with it a beautifully musky, sweet earthiness, that I realized I last smelled four years ago, before I began skipping spring by jumping from Toronto’s third winter straight to Yokohama’s summer at the end of the school year. Those three weeks where the trails thawed and grew greener by the day put a smile on my face that stretched from ear to ear, and filled me with a child-like desire to stick my hands and face in the earth and just breathe. When I smelled the trails coming to life, my mind thought not of things, but of people, places, and the emotions I felt when I last sensed a similar air. It reminded me that smell is an often underappreciated sense, with the ability to unsuspectingly snap us back in time to moments we forgot we remembered.
As cities slowly start to reemerge from quarantine, I ask that you start painting, with your nose, a brand new map of the streets and spaces you pass. Stop and smell the flowers, yes, but smell the diesel too. Smell the auto shops, laundromats, hotel lobbies, libraries, fire stations, stadiums, convenient stores, museums, and garbage dumps. Breathe in through your nose. Let it capture the essence of where you are.
Because one day you’ll be somewhere, maybe here, maybe in a different country, or on a different continent. And you’ll have a smile on your face, as you pick up the scent of a long forgotten memory.
