Smells and Bells

Before taking this course, I don’t think I thought too much about the senses, honestly. If last semester's me were to hear I said that, I would probably have been offended. I definitely have always been interested in the senses, but this class gave me such a better insight into senses that I thought I knew so much about but in reality had never sat down and had to think too much about it.  I have never thought very much about my sense of smell because of the fact that I have a very poor sense of smell normally, and I also was not expecting that we would talk about the sixth sense in this class (although I am very happy we did). I doubt, though, that, previous to taking this course, I even knew much about the senses that I appreciated greatly and was aware of how much I appreciated them. I had never sat down and had to consider how much I care about taste, and how truly important taste and cooking are to me. Honestly, I really enjoyed the icebreakers at the beginning of class, and l...

  The thing I loved most about Elizabeth Perez’s book, Religion In the Kitchen , was how she talked about cooking – and especially cooking in the home – can connect us. My mom is an amazing baker, and I remember some of my joyous moments were spent in the kitchen with us. She taught me all the best ways to cook and in all the best ways. I learned how to be organized from being organized in the kitchen, how to care about if you’re doing too much or too little, and, most recently, how to trust your gut.  I’d say that gift-giving is my love language, but my artistic family always says that there is no greater gift than the one you make yourself. Food, I feel, is such a fulfilling gift to give my friends and family. I will prepare for weeks just to make something nice for people. I love cooking to the best of my ability too. I care about presentation, having fresh ingredients, and making something tasty but also good for your body and soul.   Although my family is not re...

Artwork my dad made of a skeleton on the lid of a metal box      Classence talks in his book, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch , about the ways in which art can be tactile. He talks about how paintings can be tactile, but so can poetry. I have never thought about touch in this way before. Whenever I think about touch, I always imagine that it can only be felt through the fingertips, the skin, or other places on the body. I had never thought about your eyes or your ears experiencing a kind of touch. The more I think about it, though, the more I agree. I have been a storyteller and a writer for as long as I can remember, and most recently I have focused more on poetry than any other form of writing. I do really think that it’s because of its, in a sense, “tactile” nature. I love the ways in which poetry and alliteration can sound as you speak it, like Classence even talks about. The way a poem and the words I say sound specifically does mean a lot to me. I w...

  The New York Times article by Priya Krishna reminds me of how holidays can sometimes make isolation, like quarantine, even more apparent. Holidays are meant to be enjoyed with our loved ones, and when we can’t physically celebrate with those loved ones, the holiday is almost unrecognizable to the one we’re used to. I personally did not grow up in a large family, so holidays were never a big community-oriented get together. I also did not grow up in a religious family, so I don’t have any holidays that are especially important to me. Having to celebrate holidays by myself across the country from my family while at college, however, always reminds me just how far from home I am.  I am not a religious person, but there’s something so lonely about having to “celebrate” Easter alone. When I was a kid, I would decorate eggs with my parents, go on egg hunts, and make a large dinner with my parents at the end of the day. If I was back home, I probably would not go on egg hunts and w...

 In Chapter 6 of The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, she talks about how smell can be thought of as being attached to the dead. I have never thought of smell in this way before. If we're talking about smell being linked to death in a literal sense, I'm not sure if it's something I relate to. If death doesn't smell like a rotting corpse or food gone bad, then I associate death with silence, a lack of smell, a lack of a person. Whenever I smell something that reminds me of one of my passed-on loved ones, I don't think to myself, "Oh, that reminds me of my dead loved one." Instead, I think, "Oh, now I miss them. I remember how that's how they smelled when they were still here..." or, "This smell reminds me of this memory we both shared before they were gone." I don't have a very pleasant outlook on death, however. Perhaps if I was a part of a religion that connected death with anointments and fumigation and pleasant smell...

Interestingly, before reading Diane Ackerman's section in A Natural History of the Senses  about our sense of smell, I can't say that I had ever really thought about all the wonderful things we can link to our ability to smell things. Truthfully, I think this is because I have for most of my life had a very poor sense of smell. I remember going to the Portland Rose Garden in Oregon with my family when I was 16 and my family coming up to me to marvel at how beautiful the entire place smelled. I, however, had to stick my nose directly into any of the roses in order to smell anything.  So, after reading through Ackerman's section on smell, I really had to sit back and think about how smell has connected me to certain memories throughout my life. I loved her descriptions about the ways that certain smells would suddenly transport her back to her childhood, how something about the smell of tagging Monarch butterflies sent her straight back to Illinois in the 50s, breathing in th...