On the Scent

Thanks to an insect bite, I’ve acquired a superpower. Unlike Peter Parker, it wasn’t a spider bite, so I’m not crawling walls and fighting supervillans. In a time we need mild-mannered citizens to blossom into heroes like Spiderman, it’s a pity. The tick that radically transformed my life via an injection of alpha gal enzyme has caused far more problems than good.

However, my newly acquired super-sense, a hyped-up sense of smell, helped us stop a home invasion.

Scents prompt memories. Mine are coming thick and fast these days through accelerated processing of aromas. I’m sensing scents as clouds of particulate that irritate my nasal passages and with them, a jolt of what we know as odor. Like you, my brain processes it instantaneously, identifying threats immediately. Smoke! Pesticides! Skunk! Herbicides! Big steaming pile of crap! Now, even once scarcely noticed scents are amplified to irritants, including perfume, cologne, air fresheners, and Febreze. If it hangs in the air in a cloud of droplets (looking at you, sneezes) it’s a problem.

Before the tick bite, I never had quite the slap to the sinuses from my many minor allergies, from dust mites to mold, cats, and cigarette smoke. Now any assault to my nasal passages hits me like a tsunami. If I don’t remove myself from the offending smell, it can indeed cause me harm.

I experienced that with herbicide sprayed on weeds in a state park. I walked past a volunteer crew doing that one day last spring. Good thing I have plenty of practice in walking away quickly, but that didn’t save me. By nightfall, my nose was bleeding. By the next morning, the interior skin was sloughing off. I spent two miserable weeks with blood-encrusted nasal passages, trying every over-the-counter method from neti pot to nasal gel until it eventually healed. No chance of seeing a specialist about it while I suffered since I hadn’t “established” with one.

I joked with a friend last night that I seem to have acquired the nose of a dog. It’s ironic, since dog fur is among my formerly mild allergies. It’s made visiting friends and family almost impossible. Travel has become difficult thanks to a societal pivot in making lodgings pet-friendly. Finding a place to stay that doesn’t take pets is difficult, and as we’ve discovered in “no pets” hotels, service animals can still be roaming the halls and common spaces with their owners, including sharing elevators.

Most of the preserves I hiked through this past week had many, many “no dogs” signs, and yet my super-nose caught a whiff of dog poop far from the trailhead at two of them. Insert eyeroll. I can’t tell you how many times I see dog owners explictly ignore such signs, which are usually in place for the sake of not disturbing wildlife with a potential predator’s presence.

My reaction was immediately to check my shoes for fear I’d stepped in it. Growing up taking care of my dog from the time I selected her from a litter of puppies under my uncle’s shed to the day she died thirteen years later, picking up after her was my assignment for having brought her home. I know the scent intimately, and it always takes me back to that Sisphyean task. Like doing dishes, burying “dog dirt,” as Mom called it, was a never-ending job.

I didn’t have poop on my shoes. It wasn’t until the final hike of the day that the a-ha hit. A sign at the trailhead warned of coyotes in the area. What would coyote poop smell like? Mystery solved.

Not all my super-sniffer catches is bad. Petrichor, the scent of rain on the forest floor, is now exquisite. Damp pine duff and fallen leaves. Any walk through a garden. Honeysuckle. Azaleas. Feral orange blossoms scattered through an oak hammock, one of the delights of this week’s hikes. The ocean breeze. A healthy marsh. The expanse of a large lake. And the smell of cut grass.

Which is how I discovered the home invasion. I sat at the desk in my home office one morning, caught a huge whiff of fresh grass, and looked out the window. We have a fellow cut our yard every week or two using his big riding mower. He wasn’t out there. And the grass was tall.

I put it out of mind until the next morning, since it’s a scent I like. Sure enough, I smelled it again. I checked the window. It wasn’t cracked open, since it had been taped shut. I sniffed along the outer wall facing the yard and smelled it strongly. After moving a quilt off the wall, I started removing the top row of books from the bookshelves. Some of my more recent acquisitions from antique stores were there, a whole line of books from 1910-1939.

They were riddled with termites.

The termites had literally eaten through the interior wall of our block home and into my pre-World War II books. A patch of wallboard was down to mere flakes of paint.

Yes, you can imagine the horror on our faces and the panicked reaction to having my home office – my repository of three decades of research and writing – invaded by paper-eating insects.

Thankfully, we have a local pest control company on call. They’d been treating the exterior of our house for years, but it seemed the heavy rains of last spring encouraged subterranean termites to climb up into that interior wall. And several others.

Nearly a year later, that nightmare is behind us. It started with whole-house termite mitigation and ended with a interior tear-down and rebuild of two bedrooms. My redesigned home office is lovely. But I would have never discovered the insect invasion until those books had crumbled if I hadn’t had this hyped-up sense of smell.

Caused by an insect.