the smell we leave behind
“When you’re tearing down a house you can smell the people who built it,” said Matt Coco as he stood next to me pulling down sheets of moldy drywall from a 100-year-old house. A shiver went down my back as I thought of the ghost of people long ago coming out as we took the walls down.
“what do you mean?” I asked in confusion as I continued to pull down drywall, but slightly slower in trepidation.
“When people are building a house, they are sweating a lot and it sticks to the wood. Afterwards they add the drywall which essentially traps their smell within the walls.” Matt explained to me as he talked about his family renovating their 100-year-old home and the smells that arose after pulling down the walls. This really stuck with me and I spent the rest of the day imagining the lives of the people who built this house that I was now taking down. Did they have a family? Was construction their dream job or was it something to keep them financially afloat? What about their off time, did they spend it at the park pushing their son or daughter on the swing with tired hands and eyes. The person is long gone, but the people they left behind are not and neither is their smell – it echoes through generations to meet me in my today.
After further study into this idea to make sure Matt wasn’t just making it all up, I saw that in fact wood was hygroscopic which is the property to absorb surrounding moisture. There are compounds more highly hygroscopic than wood, but when trapped next to the wood for generations it seeps in. And in fact, our body has a unique odor, much like our fingerprints, that is determined by our genetics referred to as ‘odortypes.’ These odortypes are released whenever bodily fluids are released including SWEAT! The people who came before me to build this house left their own personal identity within the walls and as we took them down their scent was released! HOW CRAZY.
AND YOU KNOW WHATS MORE?!
Out of the 5 senses, smell is the one that brings back memory the quickest. The olfactory bulb, nerve cells involved with the sense of smell, is part of the brain's limbic system, which is closely associated with memory. So, the wood not only retains the DNA of a person, but is the sense that is closely related to memory!! WOW there is so much we can learn from this.
Although many of us are not involved in construction, we are involved in life. People we are interacting with on the daily absorb the ‘smell’ we let out. What is our unique smell made of? Does it identify us as citizens of the heavenly kingdom or the world? Where does it show our identity lies with? And when people ‘smell us’ what memories are triggered? Ones of bias and hatred? Or ones of other worldly kindness and love? I pray you think this over and what your smell has to offer this world. Because one time or another the walls will come down and what’s been trapped beneath will let out a smell correlated back to you. What will it cause people to remember?
Putting on extra deodorant today,
Ellie