I have always been blessed/cursed with a prodigious sense of smell.
I never realized that I experienced the world in a more olfactory way than most other people; I just thought other people had a greater tolerance for offensive odors than I did.
The first real memory I have of the dawning realization that I might be different was a time about 28 years ago when I was at my grandmother's house with my family.We walked through the front door, and I stopped.
"There's a dead mouse in here," I pronounced, thinking I was merely voicing what, surely, everyone else had also noticed.
My mother turned to me. "A what?"
"A dead mouse."
"Where do you see a dead mouse?"
"Can't you smell it?" I asked, as waves of thick, putrid-sweet decomposing rodent gagged at the back of my throat.
"I don't smell anything," my mother said, with her trademark annoyance.
Thinking my mother was just being her standard contrary self where I was concerned, I asked the rest of the family, "Don't you smell it?"
They looked at me blankly. "No," each one said, although my obvious certainly was starting to unnerve them in a "She sees dead people" way.
I went upstairs to use the bathroom; the air on the second floor was blessedly purer.
I returned to the first floor, and a wave of Dead Thing hit me in the face like a damp rug.
"OH MY GOD HOW CAN YOU NOT SMELL THAT?!?"
By now they were looking at me in a way that made me think of Ingrid Bergman and faulty lighting.
Ignoring their nervous stares, I dropped to my knees and began sniffing the floor, I kid you not, like an honest-to-God bloodhound. I followed the smell to an upholstered chair with panels hanging from the front. I stood, pulled the chair a few feet, and there was the body of a small mouse, its side bearing a puncture mark. Clearly my grandmother's small dog had bested the poor thing, which had crawled under the chair to die.
"AAAAAH HA!" I exclaimed triumphantly, pointing to the dead mouse.
My family looked at the mouse, then at me, and then, after a bit of silence, my mother said,
"Well, I never smelled it."
I noticed at one office job that I was the only one who smelled my boss's foot odor and bad breath. Others just smelled an office; I smelled a pit of foot sweat and gingivitis and would often breathe through my mouth when meeting with her.
It affected my personal life, too: I'd been married to a man who had bad gums, smoked, and never saw a dentist. That was the least of our problems, but I stopped letting him touch me. No sex without foreplay, no foreplay without kissing, and no kissing when your partner's mouth smells like a dumpster on a warm day.
A former boyfriend likewise was dentist-averse, and would have to brush his teeth before I could kiss him. When we'd first started dating he'd given up cigarettes; I'd explained I wouldn't date a smoker, and that if he voluntarily gave them up, he should harbor no illusions about getting away with sneaking one.
He kissed me one night, and I asked, "Did you have a cigarette?"
He was astonished. "I had one. Yesterday morning."
"Yeah. I can taste it. That's what I meant about being able to tell."
"Wow, I'm impressed."
"You should be. Go brush your teeth."
It makes life harder for me and others, but hygiene is not negotiable. Perhaps the subsequent women in these men's lives couldn't tell anything was amiss; for me it was like visiting a body farm. I imagine they are far happier with women who can't smell the teeming bacteria in their inflamed gums from across the room. Ah, love.
When I moved into my uncle's house, I could tell when I walked in the door that the cat box in the cellar needed changing and the dehumidifier needed emptying.
I could also tell that one of his cats had sprayed in several parts of the house. I soon discovered that the spraying would be resumed, on my belongings.
So while I silently retched at the stench of cat piss, and sniffed all over the house with a rag in one hand and a can of Nature's Miracle on the other, my uncle looked on in astonishment.
"I can't smell anything," he'd say, and I wanted to yell, "HOW does anyone not smell cat piss???!!??"
(Or cat crap outside the box, or the funk of a humid basement, but one battle at a time.)
Like a ghost hunter, I'd tracked down all the haunted spots - instead of cold spots, they were pockets of smell that I would travel into, stop, back up, and try to pinpoint. I'd gotten all but two, which eluded me.
And today was the victory. Zounds, Jenkins, I cracked The Case of the Ephemeral Stairway Stink and The Mystery of the Living Room Miasma!
Every time I ascended the carpeted stairway, I'd smell cat pee about halfway up. I'd stop, drop, and smell. Nothing. Could not find the source. I sniffed the floors, the walls; nothing.
Today I cracked the case with the help of two of my cats, who pointed me right to the odor.(My cats don't spray. Fact, not delusion.)
At the top of the stairway is a bathroom, which is my uncle's, and one I rarely use. I watched my cats sniff vigorously at the base of the shower curtain. I dropped and smelled. Eureka!
The reason I always smelled it when I was halfway up the stairs is because it was there that my nose was on the same level as the bottom of the shower curtain. Brilliant.
As for the living room, I finally determined that the Piss Ground Zero was tucked behind the cat tree, soaked into a corner of curtain. I took one of the several cans of nature's Miracle strategically placed around the house, and nailed it.
To quote the line from Poltergeist, This house is clean.
For now.
