Conscious Choice: Smells Evoke Memories Good and Bad

July 2006 | Body & Mind Health

Smells Evoke Memories Good and Bad

By Jonn Salovaara

Our sense of smell makes a deep connection between body and mind. A favorite supper cooking, a favorite hot beverage, an intense fruit, flower, or leaf scent — olfactory experiences like these can soothe, delight, and revitalize.

But sometimes life presents us with the reverse. Imagine your least favorite odor — the city sewer, a garbage truck, fresh dog droppings — concentrated and permanent in a place where you spend a lot of time.

Back in the middle of the spring, our tortoise-shell cat Smokey sickened. For the first time, she started not only thinking but peeing outside the box, hitting thoroughly a section of our living room carpet. In the next few days, I became more or less overwhelmed by the scent her urine left behind. It was like the funkiest, briniest, slimiest part of the ocean shore at low tide, shoved right up into my nostrils.

I used to hear, and believed, that the nose is able to smell a particular scent for only a relatively brief period of time before it wears itself out. As I sat in the living room, this smell did seem to fade for a moment, but then it would rebound. Despite chilly days, I tried opening the window closest to the scented part of the rug. That only wafted the smell around the room. The soap and water I used only intensified the smell.

I have a desk in that living room where I mainly pay bills, but particular tasks I could take to other rooms. But we sometimes actually use the room for sitting and talking — not all the time, but every now and then. I didn’t like the idea of one of the larger rooms of our small house being rendered unusable by a pet accident.

I Googled for further ideas. I found a sort of cat urine blog, where some posters felt free to ridicule those of us suffering from this affliction but where others extolled a wide range of remedies, many of them reportedly the one thing that worked after trying everything else. Peroxide and specially designed products were among the most popular solutions. Several writers mentioned that they had replaced not only the carpet, but also the boards under the carpet — I couldn’t believe this would be necessary. I tried the peroxide and the other products. They improved things for an hour or two and then the heavy, oppressive, now somewhat sweetened smell returned. I tried opening a bottle of lavender essential oil not far from the site. That just resulted in further scent confusion.

Finally, I became too busy with other things to keep experimenting with remedies, and the smell became like an irritating visitor you can’t ask to leave — always there somewhere, though you continue to hope it’s gone. I noticed it more on rainy days, and I pretty much avoided the living room.

Though I haven’t had time to remove the rug and the boards beneath — yet — I have had time to consider my reaction to this smell. I reacted so strongly in part because of an earlier visit to a house where the owners were living with an elderly dog that had lost control of its bladder. I remember my disbelief when I first smelled the interior of that house: “How can anyone live with this? This is just too much.” The owners were getting older themselves and I reasoned that their declining sense of smell made it possible for them to continue in this circumstance. Part of my problem with our cat smell was due to my previous reaction to this other house. I had strongly criticized their situation, to myself at least, and now it was my situation and I wasn’t able to deal with it any better than they did.

Thinking further, I figure that I probably associate a urine smell with the discomfort and embarrassment of childhood bedwetting and with disturbing childhood visits to nursing homes and hospital rooms where bedpans were waiting to be emptied. But even if, instead, we evolved over millennia some instinctive avoidance of this odor because it was an indicator of a nearby feline predator, it is still just a smell. I really don’t have anything to fear from Smokey (who does seem to be responding to treatment). And if visitors to our living room are critical, well, they just haven’t lived as much as I have, just as I haven’t yet walked in the shoes of the older couple with the ailing dog.

Jonn Salovaara teaches essay writing and literature in the English Department of Columbia College Chicago.

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