Less Perfume, More Petrichor.

Sal and I stepped outside this morning and turned our faces toward the sky. We do this every morning. Not only for the slap of sunshine, should it be shining, but we point our snouts into the wind and I ask her “What do you smell?”. I got a whiff of woodsmoke, a metallic glint of a retreating rainstorm, the murk of thawing mud and thanks to Sal, the complex aromas of the shit of a dog who’d had a night out on the town. Sometimes we let her out to pee after dark and when she comes back after a suspiciously long amount of time, we’ll grab her face and sniff it to see if we can tell what she’s gotten into. It almost never smells good — to us. Similarly, if I’ve been gone too long, she’ll trace my hands, between my fingers, up and down my boots, and around the tires of my car with her little black nose, flexing, and she knows exactly where I’ve been. I am really jealous of that nose. I have generally intact senses for a human, but my nose, compared to a dog or a deer or a bear, may as well be blindfolded. I sometimes feel like a toddler and evolution is the grownup, plunking me in front of a G-rated kids show with a bowl of dry cheerios like that’s all I’m equipped to handle of this sensual world. I always hated being a kid.

Our human noses might be child’s play compared to some other creatures, but what we can smell is still pretty awesome, in the truest sense of that word, and it’s not just for fun, there’s huge, hulking, import in our olfactory abilities - smell is often our most reliable sense of welcome or warning. Did you know that the human nose can detect the smell of rain, or more accurately, newly damp soil, or more accurately “petrichor”, or more accurately, the chemical “geosmin” which is excreted during rain events by the 400 million year old bacteria, Streptomyces, to attract an arthropod called a springtail to come and distribute its spores? In more click-baitey terms, human noses are 200,000 times more sensitive to freshly dampened soil than a shark is to blood in the water - pretty handy, for a water-dependent species — potentially, our most crucial “welcome”. Did you know that human noses can detect chemicals called “mercaptans” in as little as 10 parts per billion? Mercaptans are essentially the smell of death, or of organic matter in such a state of decay that it would cause death if we ate it, which is also why vultures can smell it a literal mile away — maybe our most deep-seated “warning” smell, which is also why we use mercaptans to odorize otherwise odorless natural gas so that we can readily detect leaks with our noses. Did you know that I smell like sweetfern when I’m relaxed but quickly change to the near-molten metal of an over-hot wood stove when I’m stressed? A welcome one day, another, a warning - always best to give a sniff test. It’s not trivial that dogs sniff asses and bucks spend a month every year hardly lifting their nose from the ground to follow the scent trails of does dripping in estrous - it’s survival. Human females can reliably choose their most genetically compatible mate by sniffing t-shirts recently worn by human males. Interestingly, the females are most accurate when they’re ovulating, and lose the ability all together if they’re on birth control. I love having this ability - it makes me feel smart and powerful - like I can trust myself - like I can hear, clearly, what the world is telling me.

We ordered a new roll of vacuum seal bags recently to get some more food in the freezer and when we opened the box we were hit in the face, almost audibly, with my least favorite smell on the planet - worse than mercaptans. I don’t even know what to call it other than “artificial fragrance” because it’s not just one scent, it’s a mashup of all synthetic scents to make one, scalding, omnipresent perfume to rule them all. It’s like the whole aisle in the grocery store with the laundry detergent, dryer sheets, dish soap, and air fresheners. I can’t believe they get to call them air fresheners. I get it, people like fragrances - I do, too, who doesn’t want to smell like a spring day, but when Jim Harrison talks about the pretty girl smelling like lilacs, I don’t think this is what he had in mind. I understand I’m in the minority here and that most people might be more offended by what I smell like right now than by a little floral perfume, but hear me out - I think we all want the same thing. We want our homes, our bodies, our lives to smell like the natural world, because that is our original home. The farther our lives are removed from the natural world, the more we grasp at ways to bring the outdoors back in, but our sources and therefore our senses have been perverted to a strange extent.

Exhibit A: Only $63 to smell like yourself…

These synthetic fragrances that we’ve created in an attempt to replicate home, are actually damaging our ability recognize home. The potential repercussions of this are kind of sick-making. The chemicals they use to mimic a spring rain or god forbid a summer’s eve, are documented to disrupt our body’s essential functions, and they’re becoming almost impossible to avoid. The baseline for “unscented” has moved and even things that are not scented intentionally, are scented by association. It’s like everything is made in the same factory and the scent molecules are so pervasive they leach into everything, eventually into us, and eventually the places we are grasping for - altering all of it.

There seems to me, a glaringly simple alternative - use the plants. Use the plants we coevolved with. They’re still here - they still smell good. Our ability to smell, to me, is proof of a coevolution between people and plants - and by coevolution I mean relationship - a long one. Our bodies have developed the technology to interact with the volatile compounds released from plants and the living world around us in a meaningful way. Scent is our place’s way of communicating with us, smelling is our way of listening. By clogging the airwaves with synthetic fragrances, we’re effectively plugging our ears. 

I’ve been thinking about smell so much because I’m about to be without it. I’ve been sucking in all the outside smells I can get - a binge before the long fast of winter when most of the fragrance of the living world will be too cold to volatilize and reach my nose. I have to be careful about letting myself think about this seeming sterility in the dead of winter or I get too close to some panic point that feels like I’ve got my hands tied behind my back and no one can come and cut me loose until April. I had two different winter jobs working in greenhouses when I was younger - the pay was shit, the work was shit, the bosses were shit, but I loved those jobs - for the smell - the embryonic smell of warm, wet soil like a mother’s hand on the forehead, on the belly. These days I skip the shit job and just start garden seeds much earlier than I should, here at home, and until then, I lean heavily on the brightness of evergreens. Pine, fir, cedar, spruce, are some of our most vibrant communicators. Their pungent phytochemistry has aided human health for millennia just by simply standing near them. Their compounds can be inhaled through the air, through steam or smoke, used internally by tea or syrup, externally by oil or ointment. There’s ongoing studies about bringing essential oils of evergreen trees into hospitals, and without exception (that I know of), it’s shown to improve healing time and mental health in patients and staff. I’ve been in balsam fir bliss this week - drinking tea, a simmer pot on the wood stove perfuming the stale inside air, when it’s really simmering I’ll throw a towel over my head and lean over the steaming pot to get a face and lung full. I made a balsam skin oil that I’ve been slathering on my face, hands and scalp, and dabbing inside my nose and on my wrists, I even made balsam fir Christmas cookies. This weekend I think I’ll cut our tree, which, I’m pretty sure is where I muster most of my holiday cheer.

I don’t think the world should be unscented. I just really like how the real world smells.

I got this resin from a lightning struck pine. I’m gonna make some incense with it. Maybe the lightning will add a little zing.

Below, I’ll share some recipes and resources for how to capture the best of our place’s winter aromas in skincare products, incense, and hydrosol, plus, my favorite acorn cookie recipe because, really, what smells more like home than cookies? And, of course, a poem. Stay stinky xo.