Smellevision
I’ve decided, for now anyway, I don’t hate summer after all. Sure, I could take or leave the wretched heat (preferably leave) but the benefits.
The Man of the House and I went shopping last night. I’ve never enjoyed grocery shopping, a situation worsened by my time spent working in one of those wretched places. I tell you, the things you learn… But last night it was almost pleasant.
I’m a food sniffer. It’s actually kind of a strange habit, I’m aware of that, the Matriarch reminds me of it all the time. Whenever I’m presented with a dish I haven’t tried before I sniff it first. If it doesn’t smell good it doesn’t belong in your mouth. Isn’t that a lesson that has relevance in many other aspects of life? If I’m in polite company I’ll try and be discreet about it, a subtle wafting below my nose just to test the bouquet. If I’m with the family I’ll just hold it next to a nostril and breathe in.
The result of my food-sniffing is that smell is very important to me. Often the first thing I’ll notice about a person is their smell. That can lead to some unpleasantness, let me tell you. There are people I can recognise by smell alone. They can sneak up and stand behind me and I’ll greet them by name. “How’d you know it was me?” I could smell you. Never goes down all that well. Not sure why.
That attention to smell is why I like summer so much at the moment. It makes walking into the supermarket a joyful experience. Normally when I walk in, I can smell the more or less pleasant odour of the cooked chickens. Underlying that is a slightly grubby smell of floors and trolleys. Then there’s the smell of dead things coming from the meat room. Depending on the time of the day the deli floor has its own smell, mostly stepped-on dropped stuff and chicken blood. There’s always a hint of spilled milk and associated products coming from the dairy department and washing powder from the cleaning products section.
Now, though, now I walk into the supermarket and overwhelming all of those is the smell of fruit. Nice, fresh fruit, fruit which hasn’t been stored in a coolroom in a warehouse somewhere for the past few months. I enter the supermarket, breathe in and smell peaches and plums, grapes and strawberries, mangoes and oranges.
It’s like heaven except I didn’t have to die.
Tagged: good stuff.