Scent Makes a Place
January 09, 2025 at 12:46AMThink of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. We tend to think little of our sense of smell until we lose it and suddenly notice how scent makes the world a rich and vivid experience. For Nautilus, Katy Kelleher explores the olfactory surprises and delights of the Santa Fe desert she now calls home. In comparing it as a smellscape to her past in verdant Vermont, Kelleher describes the unexpected pleasures of desert scents and smells and encourages us as readers to sniff, search, and name to be more fully present in our surroundings.
Smell, as a sense, is dependent on so many variables—it can be affected by our previous experience, our current context, and our emotional or mental state. Something may smell “good” in one scenario and disgusting in another. How we judge a smell can be changed by the sounds we’re hearing, the temperature that surrounds us, the food we’re tasting, the colors we’re seeing. It’s a sense that shifts and slips, sometimes in predictable ways but sometimes in totally unexpected directions. Much like the brain as a whole.
Similarly, a smellscape is more than the list of chemicals found in a location. It’s a poetic map of the world, fed to us through our oldest sense. The smells of the desert are more than just sweet, dusty, dry, or sharp. Each smell is a distinct sensation, but together they are more than that. Smellscapes are part of place-making, the process by which a site becomes imbued with meaning and metaphor; a place is more than just the physical location. Places have history, lore, memory, and emotion all infused into them, and encounters we have with a place are participatory.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/08/scent-makes-a-place/
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