The Smell Collector

Memory is a missing link for me. My brain seems to fight itself to remember things. Simple things, complex things, names, faces, numbers, the smell of my childhood home when Mum or John would place a pot of water upon the wood burner and fill it with dried petals and herbs collected over the summer season. How the smell would mingle with the sweet combustion of pitch and cedar, that hard-to-describe scent that tasted almost like fruit, so distinct, yet impossible to place as anything other than itself. That stovepipe rising to the chimney, reaching high into the ceiling, promising warmth and the threat of scalding touch, carried the faint perfume of charcoal and ash. Still, that smell, potpourri, spelled with the “pot” at its head, I can visualize it so clearly, sitting on the stove in the living room, shuddering at a steady boil, yet the smell eludes me. A shame, really, to have collected so many smells only to find the most intimate among them missing, a gift my parents bestowed upon the household throughout the cooler Canadian months. Why does the smell of cedar lingers so? Entombed inside the pores of my self as though it never came or went, just simply was. This is not remembered but felt.

We had two cats growing up, Kiesa and Hobbes—the latter named by my child self after Calvin and Hobbes—and they carried their own smells. Both generous contributors to a collection of odours I never meant to obtain. A litter box upon their toes, with a potpourri-like perfume of its own, tucked away in the bathroom beneath a cabinet. Or the literal shit they would deposit in that engineered sand, changing its smell as it absorbed moisture and clumped into clay-like chunks ready to be scooped into a plastic bag for the dump. How heavy it would become once activated with wetness. What chemical reaction could do such a thing? What chemical compound could capture the smell of cat urine? A fabrication of earth that mimics soil, fooling the household cat into betraying its own nature. Sometimes they would smell of fresh outdoor air, having used actual dirt as their preferred toilet—or my sandbox at the edge of the property, gifting fresh snack-sized logs perfectly suited to the palate of a curious toddler.

Kiesa was a Siamese cat, with short white and black hair, a pointed snout, and piercing blue eyes. This was the only breed of cat I could name at the time, having given little thought to cat breeds at all. We were not a dog household. Mum was bitten as a child and was often afraid of them, until decades later when Copper came along. Now she’s in love. And as any dog owner can attest, dog people are obsessed when it comes to breeds—an acceptable form of discrimination our society not only tolerates, but expects. Kiesa had a wet, piercing meow, high-pitched and nasal, like a vibrating woodwind in a soup of mucus, desperate to be heard. Anytime cheese would leave the fridge, she’d come running, meowing in such a frenzy as to give the impression she might pass out at any moment, and would continue to do so while chewing, somehow breathing and squealing and swallowing at the same time. I enjoyed to watch her as a child. Her desperation was funny to my underdeveloped brain, reminding me of my own love for baked sweets and cookies—one variety of macaroon was given the moniker “Scooter cookie” to affectionately disguise the severity of my obsession. Only Kiesa had the courage to behave this way, to demand she be fed that which she craved. There was a lesson in there for a youthful Scooter, yet I grew up polite and thoughtful, often more aware of others than myself, a blind spot I believe has affected my growth as an adult. I am still quite rotten at expressing my true feelings to a partner, or really to most people. I centre myself in stories, I tell too many and take up too much air in groups, yet rarely fight for what I want or what I believe in. Sometimes I question if I believe in anything at all. If only I could embody the determination of a Siamese in cheese-heat.

Hobbes was a fat cat, a long-haired brindle bastard who stole a lap any chance he could get. His thick fur concealed all manner of smells, substances, and twigs, unleashed upon unsuspecting noses once he settled beneath a petting hand and an unprepared face. He would excrete enormous amounts of drool when comfortable, sprawled across you with an open belly you could touch as long as you dared, and a loving disposition that even when biting or scratching would make one think there truly was appreciation in the blood he would draw. A love I felt deeply as a child. His purr, buried under blubber and thick fur, would rumble like the bass of a speaker, until he would open his mouth and release the treble of pleasure. There are few better sounds than a happy housecat. And Hobbes was truly blessed with the ring of heavenly delight. He knew he was loved. He knew he had sway. My Grandma, Olive, a frail, short woman for as long as I knew her, would get trapped by the beast upon her lap, his weighty girth and claws and teeth pinning her in place for as long as he saw fit, sometimes for hours, until my stepfather would release her from the feline grip. Hobbes would then pretend to waddle to the next lap, a slow, unsteady kind of saunter, even though we all knew how truly agile he really was by the birds he would deposit at the sliding glass door of the back deck. To a child, he was a soft creature of love. To nature, he was a harbinger of doom. But such is life on the domestic food chain.

I wonder why I remember these things and not others. I wish to remember more. It often feels unfair that so many can dredge through their grey matter and draw from a seemingly bottomless well of details and specifics, faces and names, good times and bad. What a frustrating thing to spend a lifetime building a collection, only to find so little remains on the shelf. How many lessons have I learned and forgotten? Does this feeling of spinning in circles stem from an inability to remember where I’ve already been? How is it that I struggle to keep the thoughts I pray to remember when others simply manage to stay? I gather there is an answer in that last question. Perhaps I’ll put on a kettle, pillage the neighbourhood flowerbeds, and brew myself a cuppourri. If the scent fails to summon the memory, then I can consume it instead, digesting and retaining it within my marrow, recalling it through a swift knock of bone, reverberating beneath my flesh and bypassing the failing grey matter entirely. Perhaps then, this missing link can become embedded within my person. Maybe I even call it love, for love is less a thing we remember than something we carry, woven somewhere beneath the machinery of thought. There is comfort in that, I suppose, considering how often that machinery seems to operate like a floppy disk, with barely enough memory to keep the system running and an unfortunate habit of overwriting itself. Perhaps I don’t need to remember every piece of myself to love the whole. Maybe love is the missing link in this fallible machine, the one thing I needn’t recall to know it’s there. I just need to remember to love myself. Is that really so difficult?

Come on, idiot. Remember this time.