Making Scents of it All

I have always had an acute sensitivity to some smells. I have written on my blogs before about the intoxication I get from anise, whether in cooking or in a plant with anise scented foliage. Some say anise smells like licorice, but to me it is lightly citrusy.

Witch hazel blooms have a scent that I have described as clear and burbling, like a brook. Honestly, I can hear the fragrance, and it is oddly crystalline and refreshing. A clethra shrub, called summersweet for its scent, was richly spicy, like old fashioned pfeffernut cookies.

This is a witch hazel and the funny flowers smell divine.

And I can get high from smelling Katsura foliage in fall -- that burnt sugar angel food cake smell that hardly anyone else can ever detect. Jim never could smell it, even as I stood there rolling my eyes to the back of my head, sniffing rapturously in a parking lot planted with Katsura trees all around it. 

One autumn years ago I was on a group tour at the Polly Hill arboretum with about 10 people, when I caught the indescribable Katsura scent. My head picked up, the tour leader's head swiveled and we immediately looked at each other and said "yes! there's a Katsura tree nearby somewhere." No one else in the group could smell a thing, even after we rhapsodized about what we could both sense.

This is a Katsura tree and its fall foliage has a sweet, burned scent

The New York Times magazine recently had a long feature article about smell. Humans have a much more highly developed sense of smell than we think, we just don't have words to describe it like we do for other senses. Smell is labelled as being "like something else". Anise smells like citrus. Katsura smells like burnt sugar. Witch hazel flowers smell like sweet running water.

On April 4 last year, after coming down with horrid flu when we returned from a California trip in March, I wrote on this blog about how I lost all sense of smell. It was complete and baffling but I didn't want to make too much of it, as it just seemed weird. 

Now, of course, there is much written about how loss of smell is a better indicator of Covid than fever. 

When I was sick, and coughing miserably, I ran a late day fever of 100.4 but at the time the Covid hotline told me I could not get tested unless I had known contact with a positive person and a fever of at least 100.6. My inability to smell had no significance to the nurse on the line at all. You're stuffed up, she offered helpfully, although my sinuses were totally clear. The early months of the pandemic were so botched.

My sense of smell came back after just a week or two, even before the lingering cough went away. I recovered and took an antibody blood test in late May that came back negative. 

So, without a test at the time and without measurable antibodies, I have had to carry on as if I never had Covid and am as vulnerable as anyone else. But my symptoms fit so clearly into a Covid diagnosis -- as it is known now -- that I am convinced I had it. A "mild" case, in that I did not need to be hospitalized, but I was very sick.

This is clethra in my old garden, smelling spicy like cloves and nutmeg

The NYT magazine article made me realize how critical smell is and how diagnostic it has become in Covid cases. It's sort of a neglected sense, one we aren't all that aware of having, or losing.

Until you are somewhere near a Katsura tree in autumn, or in a hazel woods in winter, or passing by a flowering clethra shrub in July, or in your kitchen baking anise cookies at Christmas, and then you know you could not live without being able to smell.