For this professional worrier, it makes perfect sense that scents are now on the list

Those of you who have been reading my column for a while know that my hobby/avocation is worrying. I sincerely believe I have a talent for it and that worrying could be my “gift.” Well, now I have something new to add to my growing list of things that plague my brain. It’s nose blindness, or as it’s called in the aroma community, olfactory fatigue.

This is when your brain over time gets desensitized to certain smells, which I find incredibly frightening. That said, nose blindness explains a lot of things, from questionable hygiene to people who are perfume bombs.

Back in the day at my childhood church, there was a cadre of women so loaded down in perfume that no one would sit in the church pews behind them. I always thought it was because the women were loud and proud about their love of Joy For Women Eau de Parfum, but now I know they were over-perfuming because their brains had surrendered to the scent.

To this day when I catch so much as a whiff of Joy, it takes me back to being 12 years old and praying that the minister’s sermon wouldn’t exceed 30 minutes. Spoiler alert, it always did because, in my dad’s words, the reverend “loved two things: the Bible and the sound of his own voice — and probably not in that order.”

But enough about body odor. My current freak out is focused on the smell of my house. This is because I recently attended an event in a very lovely home, but the smell was anything but delightful.

The house’s, ahem, signature scent was a potent mix of pets and probably years of residual pet accidents, along with mold, likely caused by loads of deferred maintenance (aka water leaks).

I have a nose for mold. You know those pigs that can sniff out truffles? Well the women in my family can smell mold. My grandmother and mother were legendary for their “mold noses.”

They could go into a house, take a few deep breaths and let you know in under 30 seconds if your home was a “terrarium of stachybotrys chartarum.” Which was their way of saying, “Darling you’ve got a black mold problem.”

According to my nose this home did have that issue. But that’s none of my business so I kept that fact between me and my olfactory neurons. What this episode did do is make me freakishly wary of what my house smells like to other people.

Was I nose blind to the scent of my own home?

As soon as I arrived back at my house I started vigorously sniffing, even crawling on knees and getting up close and personal with the baseboards. To me my house smelled OK — even good. But there was no way I was trusting my nose. It was time to bring in the neighbors and ask them to do a sniff and tell.

Since it was a Saturday and people were outside, I recruited neighbors who were in their yards to come and smell my house. A few took a hard pass but three said yes and I told them to walk around, breathe the air and honestly share what my house smells like.

I was thrilled when they all declared that my house “smelled great.” Then my husband came home and burst my scent bubble. I told him about the neighbors sniffing our home and after he called me “absolutely insane,” he proceeded to crush my joy with this single statement. “But what if the neighbors are completely nose blind to any and all gross home smells?”

Ugh. Pardon me while I now commence bleaching my entire house.

Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.