The Funk of Family

     After reading Ackerman's chapters on smell, I sat down and tried to think of my most prominent memories with smells, and how I would go about describing them to people who weren't there. I am not always the best at descriptions, and I know that I fall into the common trap of describing smells not as what they actually are, but as how they made me feel. This story has a smell that I don't want to remember, and yet I can't seem to forget.

    As some context, I have a younger brother. He is two years younger than me and ticks all of the boxes of a stereotypical teenage boy, at least in the hygiene department. He regularly forgets to change his clothes, comes out of the shower looking greasier than he went in, and I don't think he's ever had to buy new deodorant (since he doesn't use what he has). It got to the point that in the past year, my parents have had to bribe him with ice cream so that he will remember to take a shower. 

    About 6 years ago my younger brother received a baseball hat as a gift. This hat was green and had the Luigi symbol on it. My brother has worn this hat consistently for the past 6 years, and I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand the number of times that it has been washed. My brother has sweat in this hat, cleared snow in this hat, and gone through all of middle school and most of high school in this hat. Below I've added a picture of a brand new Luigi hat if you were to buy it off of Amazon now, and a picture of his Luigi hat that I took over winter break.

    My family has tried to buy him new Luigi hats so that we can put this one to rest, but my brother will refuse to wear them. The only time that you would catch him in the new Luigi hat is if the original was being washed. How did we choose when to wash the hat you may ask, and this is a great question. Currently, it doesn't feel safe to wash the hat, as at this point it's more likely to fall apart mid-wash, and the hat has become somewhat of a comfort item for my brother at this point. However, when we used to be able to wash it, I was always the one who had to put a foot down and decide that it was time for it to be washed.

    The only times that my brother is not wearing the hat is when he is in the shower or asleep in his room. When he goes to bed at night, he puts his hat on the banister at the top of our stairs and has put it in the same spot for years. Most of the time it's fine, but when he has been especially stinky, you can smell the hat as you walk up the stairs. I'm going to say this again because I want to drive the point home, walking upstairs or down the hallway, you can smell the hat. It's the kind of smell that gets into your nose and won't leave. Just thinking about the hat now I can smell it as if it is right here next to me. It's sweat and a lack of deodorant and awareness of others shoved into an object. It is the bane of my existence and there is nothing that I can do about it.

    This summer I had my worst experience to date with The Hat. My family was about to go on a long trip to visit family, and we were about to spend two 12 hour days in a row together in a minivan. I realized that if I was going to be sitting next to my brother for 12 hours, it was not going to be with The Hat in its current smell state. Knowing this, I hesitantly approached him the night before we left to kindly ask him to wear his new Luigi hat for the car ride so that I didn't gag the entire trip long. I had just smelled the hat on the banister before going to find him and knew that I wouldn't even last an hour. However, when I found him, he was wearing The Hat. This caught me off guard as I had thought that The Hat was upstairs stinking up the hallway, not on his head. I did a double-take and went back upstairs to confirm what I thought was there. It was then that I realized what was going on.

    On the banister was the new Luigi hat. I took the hat off of the banister to double-check that it really smelt as bad as it did because there was no way it could, right? I mean he never wore the new one, so how could it stink so bad? I risked it all and smelled the new Luigi hat to find that it smelled totally fine. Now the question was, what was actively smelling up the house? With Luigi hat in hand, I realized where the smell was coming from. My brother had recently exercised in The Hat, and after he was done he took The Hat off and put it onto the wooden banister. In doing so, he allowed his especially stinky workout sweat to seep into the wooden banister. He was so stinky, that the banister itself was now smelling up the hallway. 

    It was at this point that I realized I had two options. One, I could assume that my conclusion was right and move on from this, trying to forget the poignancy of my brother's stench. Two, I could smell the banister to make sure that I wasn't going crazy. I picked option two. Needless to say, I got a concentrated whiff of my younger brother's stench. Thankfully the banister's smell has gone back to normal and my brother wore the new Luigi hat for our car ride. The smell of The Hat however I know is going to stick with me for a very long time. I can't even look at the Luigi character anymore without both associating him with my brother, and also getting a whiff of The Hat.