What’s In a Smell?

It is a few weeks before Christmas and I am cat-sitting for my boyfriend. He has a beautiful 3-year old female black, grey, brown, and white feline named Piney. She is a skittish cat. She doesn’t like to be picked up or carried. She isn’t a lap cat by any means; however, she is incredibly curious, especially when it comes to smell. She sniffs everything. The spider plant hanging from the office ceiling. The Christmas presents stacked in the corner. The baseboards running around the living room. She sniffs carefully, completely as if she is getting the whole history of the room and its contents through her nose.

She begins to sniff around the cabinet I use as a TV stand, a small art-deco style piece with sliding front doors. I began to ponder what her nose detects.

Can she smell the homes it sat in before I purchased it from a flea market on Commercial Street? Can she detect the distressed red paint that covered it when I first brought it home? Does she smell how I stripped and refinished the cabinet on the balcony of the first apartment my then-husband and I shared? Does she inhale the aroma of the white china with silver decoration I once stored in it in the dining room of that apartment?

Does she detect notes of the first house I owned with my ex-husband? This cabinet sat in the living room, to the right of the TV. A silver dish my then mother-in-law gave me sitting on top of it. Can she smell the parties and movie nights we threw during the 2 years we lived there together? Does she detect hints of the fire that started on the deck the morning after my birthday party? A cigarette someone didn’t put out properly in the container on the deck.

Does she breathe in any notes of the end of our marriage? The arguments, tears, and stress of two humans realizing they don’t work together…or who maybe never really worked at all.

Does she smell the home I lived in on Main Street? Single again. Finding my way forward.

Is there an odor from the moving truck, a cold, crisp January whiff of winter leaking into the tractor-trailer as it cruises up the interstate towards its new home? Can she detect the work of settling into a new town, new state, finding a new way?

Or does she just smell wood, stain, and dust from 7 years of the cabinet sitting in one place?