Smells and Bells

My old house sits there, occupied off and on by any new person seeking an Airbnb when they pass through the small coastal town in Midcoast Maine. In the summer, they will stroll around the four-acre property sitting on a hill that overlooks a marsh with more birds and frogs imaginable. The renter, probably booked it in Airbnb for convenience, as it is close to downtown and large enough to accommodate families or a group of friends. The convenience is priority and for unconcerned renter, the property does not affect their stay immensely. The memories once made by my siblings and I playing on the swing set or sledding in the winter is completely separate from their stay in this newly renovated Airbnb. They may never lay eyes on the crumbling drywall made from horse hair because the house was constructed as an 19th-century farmhouse. They may never uncover the Sharpie on the back of the kitchen cabinets that lists mine and my siblings names. And they will certainly never experience the li...

    Singing is an Escape

          In Akerman’s chapter on Touch, her discussion on torture— “In the Middle Ages, so-called witches and others who lived on the outskirts of the law, piety, or convention were burned at the stake. Mimicking the fire and brimstone of hell, it was the ultimate horror. Death would happen cell by cell, receptor by receptor; each of life's minute sensations would be torched.” (Akerman, 69) — struck me.       The descriptions of death happening cell by cell, a mimicking of the fires of hell… it sounded familiar. Sensations of being constricted by something on your body, an unrelenting, continuous assault of the physical sense of touch.  Whenever clothing is too tight, too scratchy, too loose, too soft, I really do understand the senses described here.                    What do the Middle Ages era torture and modern clothing have to do with each other, though?   ...

  Sound and Unity/House Music and Togetherness     When thinking about how sound is used for healing, I always think about the music therapy I had to attend in residential. Every week, me and the other patients would be forced to tap out how we felt that day on a rain drum and pick a song to psychoanalyze. It was my least favorite hour and a half of each week, worse than the awkward group therapy or lowkey scary donkey petting. It was boring and cringey and didn't make me feel closer to the other people there with me. If that was all I considered when thinking about how sound brings people together, I'd think it did a pretty ass job. But outside of those grueling sessions, music played a very different role for us. One of the other six patients loved house music. He'd bump it so loud through his headphones that we could all hear it and we'd dance together.  It was silly and fun and took our minds off harder things. This little ritual brought me so much joy and brough...

  There are often sayings or phrases that show up in pop culture and on the internet which have no clear origin and seem to be passed around from social media to social media, providing new words for a centuries old feeling that still resonates with the current generation. A recent one that resonates with me is “I am a museum of everything I have ever loved,” describing how every interaction we have had, the music we listen to, the food we enjoy, the things we find beautiful (either now or in the past) influence who we are and how we express ourselves. While this by nature encompasses every sense, I’m choosing to write about expression through visual cues (heavy on the “museum” aspect).       To adorn my walls with images, art, and physical items brings me an immense amount of joy and comfort. I have always appreciated visuals, from paintings to patterns to the iridescent wings of the figeater beetle. It comes to a point where I feel I need to extract some of th...

Our skin is the largest organ on our bodies, and is the barrier between us and the outside world. We experience most of the world through feeling it (physically.) A warm breeze on our faces, the soft prickles of the grass, someone else's skin on our own. Without touch, most of the world would be lost to us, and we would be lost to the world. Touch connects us to one another. Whether it's a handshake, a hug, a pat on the shoulder. We touch to greet, love, reassure. It acts as a way to convey something to someone. We perform small acts of love for ourselves by means of touch: brushing our hair, washing our faces.      Touch is vital in experiencing the world. As Ackerman acknowledges, it is terrifying and alienating to lose our sense of touch, she uses being numbed for surgery as an example. Losing such a vital aspect of what makes us human, does that make you less than human?      Touch keeps us alive. Being able to sense a hot stove, a sharp knife, freezing...