No Good Word For It

Somewhere in the incarnation record is a timeline of when I was a perfumer. Professionally, I created scents and blended fragrances for scented products. The Latin root of this word, perfumare, means “to smoke through,” referring to even older timelines when I made aromas by burning a substance and letting the smoke perfume the air. I was a parfumeur during the Old French period from about the 9th to the 14 century when the language retained its Latin influence but changed phonologically, adding nasalized sounds here and there. After the Norman conquest of 1066, the term was solidified and we still use it today.

The skillset of a perfumer is more ancient than the word that describes this work. Evidence dates back to ancient Egypt when perfumes were used extensively and had their own developed industry. They were natural products made of fragrant flowers, spices, herbs, and resins. Long before scents were applied toward cosmetic and capitalistic ends, perfumers were on par with healers.

Fragrances help us feel better. They remove pain and melt away stress. In a myriad of forms, we inhale and absorb them. The body has specialized cells for this work. The nasal passage connects to the brain where the scent is consciously perceived and introduced into the neurology of smell. Familiar tracks laid down across the emotional landscape help us process and formulate feelings. Breathing the fragrance alive, the brain interprets and associates its emotional profile with our most vividly triggered memories.

Scent works both ways, though, and is both cause and cure of dis-ease. We can absorb infectious airborne pathogens as easily as we can sniff out a soothing rose blossom. In modern medicine, scent is relegated to aromatherapy, a complementary treatment at best. Since the mid-20th century, aromatherapy has sustained its role in emotional and psychological therapy. The practice is old. Renaissance physicians used scented natural materials in their work, and this knowledge was passed on from the Middle Ages and the influence of Arabian cultures. Further back, ancient Greek and Roman doctors used scented oils in their treatments, and then we arrive again in ancient Egypt, the culture credited with developing advanced extraction and distillation methods to obtain these precious aromatics.

“Scent was the first medicine,” my grandma says as I stir one more scoop of sugar into the fresh orangeade. Pulped half-rinds line the kitchen counter in orange juicy polka dots that smell like summer. “During the plague, when everyone was sick and dying, people would mark their doors with a big red X to warn others that the sickness was inside.” I’m eight years old with a vague sense of plague, but I nod with the confidence of someone who was there when it happened.

“But the thieves who broke into these red X places and robbed them didn’t get the plague,” she says. “The thieves survived.”

“How?” I ask, wiping my sticky fingers on the front of my apron.

“By covering themselves with a secret blend of herbs and spices and oils that protected them from infection.”

I imagine myself covered in pine needles and sap like a Christmas tree, the most scented, sacred thing I know. I stand shielded against a great sickness that is powerless against this version of me.

She turns on the sink faucet for me. One pump of green Palmolive dish soap, and I’ll remember that day forever. It was before. Before experiencing sickness. Before seeking treatment. Before raging and bargaining and begging for a cure. Before I believed in medicine or knew that the belief itself was powerful enough to open up a space for a cure.

The guest bedroom where I sleep that night is lavender scented. Pillows and candles and soaps, oh my. Eyes covered with a silk mask filled with jasmine sachets. My grandma serves up chamomile tea with honey at bedtime, and I sleep better than in any other bed, even my own. Rose oil face cream caresses my cheek with her goodnight kiss. I breathe her in. My fingertips have found this jar of white creamy potion and dabbed it onto my skin the way I’ve seen her do.

She loves me. I can smell it. It is palpable in me, a place I can return to later.

In another lifetime, I am a thief. Covered in scents and full of belief in the power of the mask that I wore. I walk fearlessly into the spaces where death has settled and still lingers in the air. Embodied with knowledge of the natural world, I consciously survive the plague. After robbing the sickly, unscented dead, I live the tale my grandmother will tell me on the day we make our last orangeade.