The Sense of Smell

THE SENSE OF SMELL
ONE DAY PONY JONES got into her car to run an errand. Immediately she smelled something odd: meat. More specifically, pork chops. Medium rare.
Another day, getting into her car after work, she smelled something else: urine-–cat urine. She looked about the car, the back seat, looking for a stain or some kind of wet, but saw nothing. Pulling out of the parking lot and into the street, she made a mental note to herself that when she got home, she’d be sure to roll down the windows-–not all the way down, of course-–she didn’t want any more cats in the car--just enough to let the back seat air out. But by the time she got home, she had forgotten all about the windows and the cat urine.
Two months went by.
Then one day, she got into her car and smelled pine trees. Not actually pine; it was spruce: a blue spruce.
Another time, she smelled salt--salt air; the beach, the ocean. Carlsbad Beach, just north of San Diego. When Pony was young, her family would spend a week each summer at Carlsbad, camping at the State Park there on the cliffs above the ocean. One time she remembered her grandmother bringing a cake down to the beach for her birthday. She’d baked it at home and had brought it down, and in the evening they all–-the whole family: cousins and aunts and uncles too-–gathered around the big picnic table at their camp site and sang "Happy Birthday"; and then Pony blew out the candles. She remembered the sweetness of the cake and the salt in the air mixing together pleasantly as she looked around at everything–-and later, after it got dark, she added the fire smells of the fire pit to the smells of the cake and the sea.
Once, she smelled a campfire in her car, and it made her think of her twelfth birthday.
Another time, she smelled cigarette smoke in her car, and it made her think of a baseball game.
Another time she smelled semen, and she remembered a basketball game.
She smelled rain and thought of rain.
What troubled Pony about all of this was that when she’d get into her car and someone else was with her, she’d ask the other person if they too smelled the odd thing. But they never did. They never did. And so, after a few of these episodes of denial, she decided to just let it go.
But not entirely. True, she never again raised the issue with her friends, but she continued to wonder about the subject. She knew–-or rather, she had heard--about poets and prophets and visionaries, people who claimed to have heard voices that no one else could hear--or to have seen things no one else could see. Pony thought about this, and she asked herself if there were, perhaps, others who smelled things that other people couldn’t smell. And if there were, what was-–or should be-–their place in society?
Pony never found the answers to any of these questions. But she began to think of herself now in a new light. She began to think of herself as a woman with special powers--or gifts–-and she wondered what she should do with them.
She decided, for the time being, to do nothing.
She would neither seek nor accept any followers; she would perform no miracles. She would not try to interpret the smells or impart meaning upon them, as people have so often tried to do with dreams and poetry.
Rather, she decided to just revel quietly in the air-–in all the air-–inside and outside her car, scented or not–-and to simply breathe. To close her mouth and to inhale through her nose and to fill her lungs to capacity. To bring the outside in. To inhale deeply and to exhale completely.