Smells and Bells

     My grandmother has lived in Cape Cod (first seasonally then permanently) since she was a teenager in the 1950’s. Her house, which was built by her father, is within walking distance of a stretch of beach. Over the years my family have visited her and my grandfather, usually during the summer, so I have been lucky enough to experience the beauty and richness of the environment during the peak of the season.    The amount of smells floating around on a hot July day in Cape Cod can be quite overwhelming. If I were to close my eyes and image I had stepped onto her front yard, some things that come to are (but not limited to): hydrangea bushes; the faint scent of pine trees; sunscreen; a dry mix of sand and stone from the dirt road that forms yellow clouds mingled with the moist salty air wafting up from the ocean. These scents have a comforting and nostalgic effect on me, one that has been shared for thousands of years by secular and non-secular people ali...

Green speaks on the power of scent and the memory it can conjure, the surreal experiences it can create. Smell has always been something I’ve been quite privy too— whether it be a pleasant or putrid one, headache inducing or heart warming, I crave the experience of linking something to a scent. One summer a handful of years ago (it was June of 2025…) I had the opportunity to take a week in Paris after a study abroad semester in Japan. Where my memory fails me, my experience in the olfactory department does not. Mainly because I bought fragrances in both locations that I constantly sniff, but that’s besides the point. Let me go over some of these scents, the good and bad, and put what Green discusses to real life experiences: Philosopher's Path, Kyoto, Japan. April 5th, 2025 : On this day I decided to take a stroll down a historic path many have dubbed "Philosopher's Path.” I think it has something to do with how many great artists, writers, creatives, etc, have walked ...

 The conclusion section of Aroma of Righteousness got me to think. What are bad smells that are comforting or enjoyable? God apparently likes the smell of a dead person. I know I don't, but what might be something like that? It isn't a DEAD human, but it's hard not to like the smell of a person. Whether it be a cologne, a shampoo, or whatever natural oils. When you really care about someone, platonically or romantically, you notice that stuff. Lying on the couch with a former boyfriend, I was absolutely outraged to find out, through my nose, that he had gotten a different deodorant. I didn't like the original one, a bit too "man" for my taste, but when he changed it, I missed it. He didn't smell like himself anymore.  My aunt is similar. Every time I see her, I'm immediately swooped into a lovely squishy hug, and she always smells the same. I'm not sure what it is, but it's always a typical overly floral aunt perfume, and it reminds me of famil...

      Like many people who have a sense of smell, I associate certain scents with certain people I hold close to me. My mom smells of the same shampoo she's used since I was a kid, my partner smells of his aerosol deodorant, and my grandpa smelled of Brut aftershave. Unlike the inherent, human smells that people have before perfuming themselves with their product of choice, the products that they would use don't stop existing once they're no longer around. Because the brain holds on to scents, it is very possible that you will remember the smell and associate it with that specific person for the rest of your life. Which makes loss impossibly difficult.      In the Aroma of Righteousness, I found the traditions of using perfumes and scented oils in the burial process to be especially poignant. Not only from a historical context, as scent would have been a large part of the preparation process in some cases simply to protect the olfactory senses of those prep...

When I think about smell, and the smells that mean something to me, two immediately come to mind. Even to this day, my mother has an unmistakable smell that makes me feel completely at ease. She works for a software company and had to travel a lot when I was little. Once I was old enough, she would sometimes take me with her. But whenever she was gone for more than a few days, she smelled different when she came home. One of the first times she went away that I can actually remember was a trip to California. She left at about one in the morning, and I begged her to wake me up so I could say bye. I cried as I waved through our glass door and watched her car leave my driveway. When she came back, her hair was straight, and she was wearing a green cashmere sweater; she looked beautiful. But all I could do was cry, out of relief, yes, but also because she didn’t smell right. She smelled like a mixture of her normal scent mixed with something that screamed hotel. The other scent that immedi...

 I miss the stinky streets of Montpellier, France. During my study abroad last semester, the streets I wondered down everyday left a powerful impression on me. Not a particularly positive one either. At the time I was there, I had visceral reactions when I walked down certain streets in the small city and saw trash crumpled on the sidewalk from people stepping over it all day long. I don't know if it was just a quintessential city smell or if it was specific to Montpellier, but there was a potent odor that no new foreign student could deny. Especially one from a small coastal town in Maine, with the only strong detectable odor being the salty Atlantic Ocean. The city was beautiful and quaint, but I came to learn that certain parts were best avoided or at the very least, I needed to cover my nose to walk down a street or two in my neighborhood, Plan Cabanes. My friends and I joked pretty much everyday about how there was an unpleasant smell wafting down the narrow roads that lay bet...

Aroma of Righteousness / Smell  Before reading Deborah Green’s The Aroma of Righteousness, I mostly thought of smell as something simple. Something either smells good or it smells bad. What I found interesting is that Green shows how smell had a much deeper meaning in ancient Jewish culture. Perfume, spices, and incense could be connected to religion, people’s character, love, sacrifice. One part that stood out to me was the story of Rabbi Eliezer. He was very poor while studying Torah and ended up eating dirt, which caused him to have bad breath. His teacher explained that even though his breath smelled bad, the knowledge he gained from studying Torah would spread like a pleasant fragrance. Green uses this story to show how a bad smell could be transformed into something positive and meaningful.  Quote: “The fragrance of your learning go from one end of the world to the other.”  I also found it interesting that Green explains how people in this time period experienced sm...

 When looking back in my memory for a suitable story having to do with smell, my mind went back to when I was a kid. After my dad passed away, my memory kind of blurs and contorts, but one of my first big impressions of my mom in the after-time had to do with smell. She was only forty when he passed away, and nothing prompts somebody to fall into a midlife crisis like a large tumultuous event like a loss. Her new drug of choice was essential oils. Not in the antivax way, but to compliment them: to dispel mosquitoes or ease headaches or digestion, to put in baths or baked goods. Most commonly, we would make what she called "lotions and potions"- scented oils in any smells we wanted. Though she long lost interest in it, I can see why at the time she gravitated to the allure of smells as a way to escape loss. Green spoke of  "Soothing odors" (72) in The Aroma of Righteousness , as spoken of in the Hebrew Bible, as smells were extolled by the ancient Jewish people, as t...

       In Aroma of Righteousness one idea that really stuck with me is the idea that smell can connect us to something otherworldly. Green uses the example of incense being used to reach God and as a result those people feel closer to God. I'm not a religious individual, when I was forced to go to church as a kid I didn't smell anything and feel connected. But I do think this happens in the real world with much smaller instances, it has the same impact though. I have always lived near water since I live in Rhode Island and as a kid I was constantly surrounded by water. But when I went to college in Virginia it was a shock to me to not smell salt water when I went outside. It's interesting now to think about how I felt so detached from home. When I moved back to Rhode Island I was so happy to hear the sound of the ocean and smell it, even just seeing it I felt so much closer to my home. This to me is a much smaller version of what Green describes when people use incen...

" The acts of lighting incense and the anointment of the priests are also depicted through highly evocative images of distinction and exclusivity." (Green, 69) In this photo, there are three people wearing white robes. Two are priests, who went through years of schooling and religious teachings, who worked hard to be called priests-- pillars of our community. The other person is me. We are not equal in our knowledge, or religious commitments, but we are dressed the same. I have been promoted to their level for one thing: I'm handling the incense.  In my hometown church in Connecticut, this photo was taken in April 2025, on the Saturday of the Great Easter Vigil, the first official service celebrating the return of Jesus. It's held around sunset, and usually also includes a handful of baptisms. I was raised in this church, Trinity Episcopal in Torrington. The two priests behind me in the photo have been priests for me in different times in my life, and are still import...

  Although most of my life, I haven't associated scent with religion, there’s a special comfort in knowing that smells are symbolic of something. It makes me think of the lovely cherry blossoms that grow down the street from my apartment. They were one of the first things I saw when I moved to East Providence, and I would say they have one of the best smells. It reminds me of back home in Vermont, where cherry blossoms sprouted year after year in my front yard, very subtly next to the poison ivy. In many ways, the tree down the street is symbolic of my childhood, from my first poison ivy rash and sandwich picnic to one of the last springs I had with my grandma. The sweet floral scent stays with me, as do its memories. Green states that the term “soothing odor” has been used in literature to describe God’s acceptance of sacrifices (Green 72). Maybe, in some ways, this smell is a sacrifice to me because it is fleeting and doesn’t always come around. Sacrifice to me, then, is knowing ...

            As many individuals in my immediate circle can attest, I have always been quite the “foodie” throughout my 20 years of life. Never once in my existence have I been described as being a “picky eater” (or even a dainty eater, for that matter). While it may seem like a natural progression for someone who has always possessed a love of eating to (inevitably) acquire a great interest in cooking, many family members of mine were taken a bit off guard by my enthusiastic acceptance of the culinary arts. This unpreparedness on their part seems to stem from their preconceived perceptions of me as a possessor of a highly perfectionistic personality type. Cooking, at least in the terms it has most often been described as being to me, is well known as being a practice that doesn’t necessarily require chefs to follow recipes to a tee; there exists a lot of room to improvise on the ingredients (and their portion sizes) that can differ from an original rec...

  Smell transfers you to the location, looking at a picture I'm reminded of the smell and how I felt at this time.I love going outside in the rain it has the fresh clean smell of a new beginning. Everything “dirty” is washed away. The grass is soft and wet, the water droplets everywhere. It’s quiet and all i can hear is the rain hitting the ground. Smell and sound tie closely together for me. With all the industrialization there is a certain smell but after the rain I almost forget about everything else and am transported to what the world was before there is the “soothing oder” green talks about. I sit outside and breathing deeply watching, when someone walks by I get a glimpse of the perfume or cologne they are wearing. If someone is cooking nearby I can smell the delicious aromas. When i sit outside smoking watching it rise up into the air with the mix of the wet earth there is a grounded experience. All of these different smells happening at the same time or though out the time...

𖧧  Aroma of Righteousness/smell- Smell in the Context of Ritual  𖧧      Scent is inherently holy. Even as someone who is not religious, I fully believe this. Before I wrote this, I switched out my room scents for fall. There's a honey crisp apple candle sitting under my wax melter and I've reapplied my trader joes pumpkin body butter at least three times because it smells so good. Even my sheets are freshly washed and they smell like the honey rose fragrance pebbles I've been tossing in the washer. The window is open and the fresh petrichor smell becomes stronger with ever wave of rain. Together, it smells like how every autumn since I was a kid smelled like. This is why I think scent is so holy. No other sense has the ability to transport you through time like smell. It can bring you back to a specific place or memory and the exact emotions you felt during that time. For example, with the autumn smells, I feel very warm and happy because fall has so many good...

       Smell is one of the most important and complicated senses; it triggers great nostalgia for me, but I can't even begin to put it into words.  Walking into the kitchen, I smelled all sorts of food my dad was cooking or experimenting with (we were his guinea pigs). Sizzling stir-fry with fresh vegetables from the garden, the warm steam off a bubbling pot of broccoli cheddar soup, roasted vegetables with the strong, sour smell of balsamic glaze, and the most nostalgic dinner: cornbread with rice and whatever beans we had in the pantry. These scents are hard to describe because they connect to so much more than the food itself. They bring back specific moments, people, other connected senses, and feelings that I might not recall clearly without the smell attached to them.  My Dining room where all family dinners take place      Green says that smells are the hardest sense to describe, yet somehow the most vivid, even though they fall into o...

 I've talked about this in class before, but let's all wipe our memories and pretend this is new.  I used to live in Vermont, and my grandparents have a house in Chatham (Cape Cod) that we would visit for the summers. It was a long drive back then, four hours in the car, half asleep in the backseat. I would always know when we'd arrived, as I would be picked up by my dad. The garage door was loud, usually jarring me a little, but I always knew what was coming next. The smell of the garage in Chatham has colored my summers since before I can remember. It's a specific sort of musk, not mold, that reminded me of sitting in a large pink bucket as a child, or walking down Main Street with a brown paper bag stuffed full of candy.  As I've grown up, that smell remains dear to me, but less naively upbeat. It now reminds me of losing our annual wiffle ball game pitcher to cancer, days on the boat, being the odd one out, lots of laughs over all the seasons, and so, so much mo...

Cats in the fish-market Tetouan, a city on the northern coast of Morocco, had long been a crossroads of civilization. The city had seen peoples from many lands come to its shores, including Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, yet its most famous story had to do with mercy in a time of need. Including Jewish and Muslim refugees from Granada in Spain, fleeing the Inquisition and the end of both Muslim rule and the Jewish golden age. For centuries, it had been known colloquially as bint al-Garnatah, the daughter of Granada, and even its official name stemmed from that history of cross-cultural connection. It came from titti-wan , Rifian Amazigh for "eyes in the mountains", referring to guards local lords had appointed to watch over these refugees build new homes after hey had lost everything. For centuries, it had been a place of welcoming and renewal.  However, in June of last summer, the city saw a new group of travelers: ten bleary-eyed Wheaton students, three days into a...

    I'm late to this post, and  I skipped class when the making of this post was discussed, I think. I'm not sure of the parameters, what we're supposed to be writing about, aside from a sense, and I can't find a mention of it in any syllabus material. This is my fault, as I wasn't in class! Instead of being in class on that day of Thursday the 17th, I was in the sculpture and printmaking studios, just one floor down, working on two different projects. For this blog post, I'll be focusing on the sculpture assignment: a life-sized bust of myself. Pictured are the progress photos I've taken-- the current product is mostly finished, it just needs to be glazed and fired (making it strong and shiny, essentially).      Sculpture is all about touch and sight. While there is the smell and taste of clay, and the sound of soft clay being sheared off or the slap of wedging, the making process is focused almost entirely in the hands and eyes.       ...

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?   ...