Comforting olfactory hallucinations
For about a half hour this morning, I smelled my grandfather.
Not the shaving cream he used to use, not the breath mints shaped like O's he'd always have in a drawer in the kitchen that I loved sneaking as a kid. My grandfather has been dead for almost six months now. But the scent I had stuck in my nose was the same smell on his worn button-down shirts thrown into the back of his closet that we had to clean out after he died. The smell that made me reluctant to wash the shirts I adopted from him because they were comforting and reminded me of him. The smell of lovingly tending tomatoes and finishing crossword puzzles and always having the sleeves of those shirts rolled up to about mid-forearm because he was always doing something.
The scent wasn't coming from a coworker or anything I was wearing or anything I had eaten, it was undefinable (other than that it was my grandfather's), but it followed me from my desk and down the hall as I went to grab my third cup of coffee today. I soon became overwhelmed by other smells - the coffee, the aftershave of someone walking past me - and it was gone.
But for a half hour or so, as I sat at my desk proofing magazine copy and feeling annoyed by how much my editor had messed with one of my articles, I breathed in my grandfather's scent, and felt surprisingly calmed and relaxed.
-B
Not the shaving cream he used to use, not the breath mints shaped like O's he'd always have in a drawer in the kitchen that I loved sneaking as a kid. My grandfather has been dead for almost six months now. But the scent I had stuck in my nose was the same smell on his worn button-down shirts thrown into the back of his closet that we had to clean out after he died. The smell that made me reluctant to wash the shirts I adopted from him because they were comforting and reminded me of him. The smell of lovingly tending tomatoes and finishing crossword puzzles and always having the sleeves of those shirts rolled up to about mid-forearm because he was always doing something.
The scent wasn't coming from a coworker or anything I was wearing or anything I had eaten, it was undefinable (other than that it was my grandfather's), but it followed me from my desk and down the hall as I went to grab my third cup of coffee today. I soon became overwhelmed by other smells - the coffee, the aftershave of someone walking past me - and it was gone.
But for a half hour or so, as I sat at my desk proofing magazine copy and feeling annoyed by how much my editor had messed with one of my articles, I breathed in my grandfather's scent, and felt surprisingly calmed and relaxed.
-B