During Theophany this year, Svetlana gave me some perfume in a small decorative glass bottle. A couple weeks later my parents came back from the Holy Land and gave me some perfume in a small decorative glass bottle. Svetlana's perfume was yellowish; my mother's was greenish. Both, I hear, smelled nice.
I, however, couldn't smell a thing. I suffer (hyperbole only) from anosmia--which is a complete or almost-complete loss of the sense of smell. I can smell some things, like Ella's skin lotion and occasionally a small flash of cooking meat, but for the most part I can't smell anything. For example, I rely on the kids to tell me that Little Mark has a dirty diaper. Fr Mark & Rose usually won't tell me because they think I'll insist they change it. Cilantro is one of the most obvious things I can neither taste nor smell.
Anyway, tonight I paid the price of my disability.
When I put Max down to nap this afternoon I decided I would put up my makeup box since Little Mark has gotten into it no less than three times in the past six days. He usually takes the opportunity of his nap to sneak into my room (where Max naps) and to play. As I placed my box out of reach on Fr Mark's dresser, it occurred to me that all it would take is a small tug from one of the boys to pull the entire contents of his dresser (sitting on a decorative cloth) down to the floor. We put the two bottles on his dresser in an attempt to keep them out of reach.
I decided that since I never wear perfume I would finally just dump the contents of the two bottles down the toilet. That being done I decided to take the two bottles to the kitchen trashcan, since any drop in our bedroom trashcans would smell up the room for weeks. As I walked down, the ever curious pack rat, Ella, asked what I was doing with those two beautiful bottles. I explained and she convinced me that if I just put them into the dishwasher, they would be washed and she and Margaret would simply put them on a high shelf, never to be bothered by the boys. I gave in.
So tonight I made shrimp pad Thai for the family. I went into the dishwasher to use the strainer we had used for our lunch's noodle dish. Since I can't smell, it wasn't until the meal was served, that I found out that all the complex aromas of peanuts, carrots, cauliflower, sugar snap peas, mung bean sprouts, cilantro, lime juice, and the accompanying spices really just smelled like a French brothel--with shrimp.
I finished my meal because I didn't taste it. Everyone else said it tasted bad--but 2/3 of them would have said it was nasty whether they were eating Eau d'Thai or anything other than PBJ. Welcome to my life.
