grown in rwanda

Lowell interviews Nyirahabimana in Gisagara, Rwanda.

Minsi myinshi (long time), Nosy friends! I have missed you. I apologize for this fallow period. I've had a lot of trouble accessing Blogger from Rwanda, where I'm still happily sniffing the best coffee on earth and burying my nose in my scarf against burning-tire smells. I've also neglected this space some in favor of finally finishing a big draft of my novel, which I hope smells like the air before a summer thunderstorm. Though I haven't been posting much, I'll return to the U.S., thanks in a major way to my Kinyarwanda-speaking partner (pictured in the field above, eliciting the laughter that "What do you, yourself, think you smell like?" was usually met with), with heaps of really amazing Nosy Interviews that I'm so eager to share with you. (We've collected nearly 100! I'm also sitting on a small but marvelous backlog of interviews from sniffers in the U.S. and other parts of the globe--I haven't forgotten you either!).

Look what grows in Rwanda (floral arrangements by Ru, one of my very favorite visitors)

We return to the U.S. this week, and once I catch my breath I hope to deluge you with so many smells you'll be dizzy. Apologies to those who have provided such lovely interview responses only to have them languish for this long (fermenting nicely!), and to you, if you've come here lately hoping for some fresh smells only to find me wishing you a Happy New Year/Valentine's Day yet again. I do hope the first half of your 2014 has been fragrant, that beautiful flowers are blooming wherever you are, and that you'll stick with me even after this sorry stretch of blog-anosmia. A sneak preview of some of the smells people here have shared stories about: snake's breath, the flower that kills luck, clean riverbeds, sun-dried laundry, warm milk, and every smell you can imagine (and some you haven't yet) relating to cows. 

love you, stinkpots

Yow! Happy Valentine’s Day! What could be more romantic than the removal of the toilet in your home, exposing a vast waste-well that dwells just beneath the floor? It is tremendous, really, the smell of so much waste, and contrary to my hyperbolic moans and groans, and the speed with which I fled the scene, I suppose I still believe it is good to be reminded, once in a while, of the shit just beneath the antiseptic pink bathroom tiles. And this shit, forced as it is to linger in the city, underneath so much concrete, confronts with such force precisely because it is indoors, doesn’t even have the benefit of being surrounded on all sides by trees and breeze and grass and dirt and the shit of other animals, powering up the plants that fuel our future shits. [Updated to add: The source of the ongoing toilet drama turns out to be tree roots growing into, and blocking, the pipes. Know our power!, say the mighty trees, even as we rip out their roots.]

I smelled many amazing things in January. Some highlights:

Sniffin' hard

• Early in January, my new friend Mario, who has been incredibly generous with his amazing olfactory knowledge, invited me to a cupping at the Starbucks Farmers' Training Center in Kigali. It was great fun to play around with the coffee notes kits, to sniff and slurp freshly-roasted coffee with expert cuppers, and to gain insight into how professional noses approach coffee. Mario stressed the importance of being able to differentiate between preference and description, something I struggle with when approaching complex aromas. My nose zooms right in on the notes I love (chocolate, maple syrup, and toast when it comes to the coffee I'm drinking most often these days), and I want to work on sussing out those notes that I don’t love so well.
  
  
  

  

  Mario in his element

•  Mario, pictured above with an in-bloom coffee tree growing in his front yard, is also responsible for introducing me to the smell of a coffee flower. It was so beautiful! It smelled of jasmine and lilac, two flowers I adore, and I was swooning at the thought of encountering whole fields of these. Mario and Lucius, resident coffee geniuses, have both spent loads of time in just such fields, and their descriptions have propelled coffee-field-in-bloom to the top of my travel wishlist. 
• I learned that the heady, crazy-making flowers in the previous post are called brugmansia, or, in Kinyarwanda, ikigogo/ikijojo, and that they can legitimately make you mad. (Thanks to Elizabeth and Diana for sharing your plant wisdom.)  

  

  Ice-chip-sized hail!

• In late January, there was a freak hailstorm in Butare, amidst day after day of sunshine and near-90s weather. The ground near the National University was steaming as the huge pieces of hail melted, and this seemed to set off every fragrant plant in the area—my husband and I could smell blasts of eucalyptus and lemongrass from the car even with the windows rolled up. There was also a super-intense curry-like smell that reminded me very much of asafoetida. We found the scratchy little leaves that were giving off the hing-smell, and I'll endeavor to find out what the plant is called (when the leaves dried, they smelled much fruitier, almost plummy or currant-like. Nature is nuts!).

In spite of the hail, it's the short dry season in Rwanda, and this means the return of what I've come to think of as dusty B.O. The hot sun leads to sweatier humans, to be sure, but I think there's a particular bite to the B.O. that's mixing with so much kicked-up dust. It’s one of the first smell-changes I noticed in myself when I arrived in dusty Kigali last summer. I want to learn to embrace elements of this powerful stink, to again distinguish between preference and description, and to fight against the fact that I was, like many Americans, “born with deodorant in [my] hand.” (Click that link for great interview with Sissel Tolaas in Swallow magazine.) To understand a place, to know a person, you must smell them at their worst. Not that I think it’s possible to understand anywhere, to really know anyone, but the joy comes in the endeavor, the trek through all that shit.

new year, new smells

Mwaka Mushya, Nosy Readers! I've neglected this space lately, but I’m still experiencing all sorts of new smells in Rwanda. We’ve relocated from Kigali to Huye/Butare, where the dusty red roads, rows of semi-abandoned storefronts, and legitimate cowboys give the place a real Wild West feel. But the people are warm, and Butare is home to the best ice cream and coffee in all of Rwanda (more on both in later posts), so it’s a good move. I will be back with new Nosy Interviews soon, but in the meantime, here are some of the best and worst things I’ve smelled in the last few weeks:

The best:

Image via Mallee Native Plants

1. Eucalyptus seeds! Have you ever seen these? They look like darling vintage buttons, bell-shaped and clustered together, their star-shaped openings secreting the stickiest rich sweet smell of their seeds. I’ve had a dried cluster on my desk for a couple of weeks, and it still yields its plummy (more in terms of the color of the smell than the actual smell), tangy, resinous scent. Let’s hope I don’t get one of these gum nuts stuck in my nostril.

   

   (so overwhelmed by the scent that I've gone blurry)

2. These yellow bell flowers! Their smell is totally insane! (That’s me above, standing under them, drunk with delight. Does anyone know what these are? I must get myself a field guide.) These bloom at dusk and in the evenings and they will give you a new understanding of the word intoxicating, their sexy indolic smell enough to make you wish to become one of the bugs or birds that goes bell to bell, helping these plants propagate.

   

   An inyambo gets scented up 

3. It’s been far too long since we’ve discussed manure around these parts. I recently smelled some very fine dried and burning cow dung (royal cow dung) in Nyanza, where the royal herd is kept. The herders burn a huge stack of dried dung to keep flies away from the cows, and these majestic (and smart!) creatures come over and stand inches from the fire to season their skin with the smoke, and make its fly-repellent power last.

The worst:

1. Burning tires/garbage still holds my top-spot for smells I like least in Rwanda. On a walk, my dear friend D. mentioned how the smell reminds her of her childhood, and because of this, she likes it. People are often surprised to learn that others like smells they consider gross: manure, gasoline, skunks. This might be the first time I joined in such surprise, and even though the odor of burning tires still makes me want to gag, I do think of it a bit differently since she shared her nostalgia with me.
2. A new contender for grossest smell in Rwanda is the sausage-like aroma that rises up from one of the toilets in our new place (Welcome/warning, future houseguests!). Yesterday I think I came closest to an accurate description when I described it as ‘hot-rot turkey carcass.’ We’re working on it (both getting rid of the smell (me & my husband) and figuring out how best to describe it (mostly me, as he doesn’t think it’s quite as bad as I do—hopefully future houseguests will find they agree with him.)).

I’ll be back soon with some recommended reading and more notes on smells, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear about the best and worst things you’ve smelled so far in 2014.

like rocks long for rain

Is it possible I learned the word petrichor from Tumblr? I believe I can thank Tumblr for both leading me to believe the lovely word referred to the scent of any and all earth after rain, and for teaching me that it's, more specifically, the smell of rain on dry earth. Petrichor, according to Wikipedia, is "the scent of rain on dry earth, or the scent of dust after rain. The word is constructed from Greek, petros, meaning stone + ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology. It is defined as 'the distinctive scent which accompanies the first rain after a long warm dry spell.'" According to Scientific American, "Petrichor was first described in 1964 by mineralogists Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas...As they defined it, it occurs when airborne molecules from decomposing plant or animal matter become attached to mineral or clay surfaces. During a dry spell, these molecules chemically recombine with other elements on a rock's surface. Then when the rains came, the redolent combination of fatty acids, alcohols and hydrocarbons is released."

Our street corner (before the rains) in Kigali 

Petrichor is on my mind and in the air so much lately, here in Kigali. When we arrived it was so dry and dusty that the insides of my nostrils, when I tried to blow them clean at night, would be sometimes clogged with the same red dirt from the roads. Now the rainy season is beginning, and the wet fresh smell rising from all those stones and clay after rain is one of the very best things about being here. If you've gotten an e-mail from me lately, it's likely contained a lament about how much I'll miss fall, my favorite season, all those smoky, caramelly, woolly, crunchy-leaf smells. Petrichor may prove to be my consolation. Though it's not salty, it has the same calming effect as sea air I've smelled and loved in New England and the Pacific Northwest. Everything in the air here changes after these heavy rains--the light, the weight, the sounds. Things turn dark green and then golden and the smell is close to chlorinated, but with none of the burn. I will long for autumn as I’ve always known it, but feel lucky for the chance to fall in love with this new (to me) season’s smell also, all that wet clean rock, all that dark rushing road. 

nosy in (& about) rwanda

Kigali as seen from St. Paul's

Nosy friends! Two weeks from now, I'll be back in Rwanda. I'm headed there for ten months this time, and I imagine my already erratic schedule for posting Nosy Interviews will grow even more so. But I'm eager to gather new Nosy Interviews while in Rwanda, and excited to say I'll be collaborating with the way-cool Institute for Art and Olfaction to showcase the responses I collect in a meaningful way. 

So much fun, fragrant, & innovative work is happening at The Institute for Art and Olfaction.

My fondest smell memories of my last visit to Rwanda include the smoky green tomato leaf scent I wrote about here; the damp, resinous air on our hike to see the mountain gorillas, who were feasting on huge strips of eucalyptus tree bark; and the steaming veggie roundels served at Zaaffran. My least favorite smell memory is of the intense automobile exhaust in Kigali. Another strong smell memory that defies such categorization is that of the bodies preserved in lime at the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre. That is a smell I will never forget, but should I mention it? Is it wrong to describe what it was like to stand in those rooms, windows wide open to the hills surrounding us, a song carried in on the slow breeze from the church on a neighboring mountain? What can I say? For the same reason it feels wrong to post a photograph, devoid of context, it feels wrong to say this one thing, what the rooms smelled like, and nothing else.

On our way to Volcanoes National Park to see the mountain gorillas

But it feels wrong to leave it out, too, to write only about how much I loved the tree tomatoes, how even the gorilla's shit smelled pretty good (all that eucalyptus) and not say also that there was a smell in those terrible rooms, and I stood there inhaling it, trying not to think about what it meant. It feels somehow depraved to speak of certain things in smell terms, but I don't think that's because it's disrespectful. Maybe a smell detail gives too much life to the things we wish to distance ourselves from: wounds, rot, death. 

Here's a Kinyarwanda (the language of Rwanda) word I learned (from my anthropologist husband, whose PhD fieldwork is driving our trip) today: 

guhumura: to smell good, to stay calm, to be consoled or comforted, to not be afraid

If a word can be a talisman for travel, for this project, I can't think of a better one. I hope to smell good, to smell deeply and well (even when my nose resists). I hope to stay calm in the face of challenges that arise from living outside of my comfort zone, like when I inevitably and inadvertently look/act a fool in my attempts to connect, and to not let fear--of seeming foolish, of being sad or uncomfortable, of threats real or imagined--keep me from staying open, asking questions, and sharing what I can with the people I meet, and with you. 

the air from here

All critters created by the LBJ Conser-clay-tion Club.

As I was last year around this time, I'm breathing Pacific Northwest air right now, remarking nearly every single time I step outside at how incredible it smells here, how you really forget that when you live here, how invigorating I find it, all this mountain-ocean-pine-ancient-glacier-freshest-coffee air. My husband usually breathes in deep and agrees, even though he has heard at least one hundred iterations of this monologue since we stepped outside at SeaTac and I exclaimed how even the airport-adjacent air, not traditionally known for its ability to invigorate, is better here. And it is!

LBJ Conser-clay-tion creation.

Better even than airport parking lot air is San Juan Island air, and that's what I've been fortunate enough to breathe these past few nights, gaping up at what seems like all of the stars between nearly all of the pine trees, dumbstruck by the beauty of this neon-mossed, pine-studded, sea-whipped island, wondering at how lucky we are just to get to walk around on this planet, and when we get to breathe in air that makes us feel especially alive it seems like too much almost, too bracing to keep even for one split second in our lungs.

LBJ Conser-clay-tion creation.

programming note no.5: summer break

 Cill Rialaig, © Robert Spellman

I'm headed once again to a land of limited internet access, so lights will be pretty dim around here for the next couple of months. I'll be back on a more regular basis in August with notes on new smells and lots more nosy interviews. In the meantime, please enjoy some reruns. I wish you sunny days and breezy nights filled with your favorite summer smells (after-beach skin, bonfires, fruit floating in sangria). What does a forget-me-not smell like?

green mountain air

A couple of weeks ago, my main squeeze and I took a road trip through Vermont and it smelled great. The nosy highlight was definitely Plummer's Sugar House, a maple syrup operation we visited just outside of Grafton.  Two kind, bearded Vermonters showed us how the syrup makes its way down from the trees and let us stand there with them while the small outbuilding filled with the syrupiest, warmest steam. Everything icy outside was melting, but the warmth of that cement-floored room somehow made me more aware of the cold smells outside; the snow, the dirt, the gravel. I could have stood there all day. I asked the owner if he noticed the smell anymore and he said not at all, never, not even on his clothes when he leaves.

LemonUp next to "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" at the Vermont Country Store

The Vermont Country Store, ur-general store, also yielded loads of nosy delights, including LemonUp Shampoo and Conditioner (pictured above) which smelled so exactly like a sucked-on Lemon Drop candy that it was difficult to resist the urge to pour the product directly down my throat. Isn't the bottle fantastic? Why can't I get my fussy all-natural stuff in bottles like these (made from corn-plastic, please)?

Sugar, milk, milk, cream, & cream at Ben & Jerry's

We also managed to visit both a deliciously fragrant chocolate factory and Ben & Jerry's headquarters, where there wasn't much to smell, to be honest. I'd previously read that it's actually due in part to Ben Cohen's anosmia that Ben & Jerry's ice creams rely so much on texture provided by all those chunks and swirls, but I forgot to ask about this during the tour as I was too enchanted watching pints of Jimmy Fallon's Late Night Snack come off the line, get their lids, and do a little flip before disappearing out of sight. Also, the tour was loaded with puns, and I have a soft spot for puns (I hold myself back so hard around here!) so I was pretty focused on enjoying those and imagining which flavor we'd get to sample at the end of the tour (Milk & Cookies, totally scrumptious). It was warm enough to sit outside with our ice cream cones, and I was struck by how the sky looked just as it does on Ben & Jerry's packaging, perfect cartoon blue. The bright sun melted the last of the snow but not our ice cream cones, and spring smells bloomed green all around us.

pining hard

Steep Ravine soap, Cascade Glacier essential oil, and solid perfume in Stag

My piney little haul, picked up in Seattle and pictured above, demonstrates how much I miss the Pacific Northwest. The air there! I was in Seattle all of last week, and on the day the snow finally melted and the wet ground warmed, I was hit with such a blast of green and ice and pine that I felt scrubbed and dizzy and brand-new. It's the opposite of being unable to catch your breath, it's all breath, all freshness. But real fresh, not cleaning solution or cosmetic "fresh," fresh instead like you've been breathing the wrong air for a while, like a gentle glacier just eroded five years from off your face. 

Juniper Ridge products really do come closest to that smell of smashed pine needles in your palm, and the Cascade Glacier oil is so brisk and beautiful that even the whiff off my fingertips from tightening the cap makes me feel like I've just come off an invigorating hike (the actual hikes I took while in Seattle last week were less of the invigorating nature-loving sort and more of the hiking-is-the-only-way-to-get-anywhere-in-town variety). The Stag fragrance is the solid perfume version of my beloved candle (this pine kick won't quit!) and Christen of Knows Perfume in West Seattle told me that the creators at Soap & Paper Factory thought she was joking when she asked them where the solid version of Stag was (solid perfume versions of the other candles in this series were already available), and that when she convinced them that she wasn't kidding, they put it into production for her. Christen told them, "This is Seattle. We want to smell like trees here." 

nosy new year

My bottle acclimates to its Midwestern surroundings.

Happy New Year, nosy readers!  I wish you a 2012 filled with new smell discoveries as well as familiar or forgotten scents that make you swell with emotion.

The holidays were the usual sensory riot. I had a bit of a cold, but still managed to eat more than my share of cookies and breathe in some nice smells:  

• The smokiest scotch I've ever smelled (Pop, if you're reading this, what was that delicious scotch?)
• I drained a full sample of Sweet Redemption for my parents' annual holiday party, and people seemed more eager to hug me than usual (they lingered due to my fragrance rather than their scotch intake).
• I was so happy to unwrap a bottle (pictured above) of Un Bois Vanille (the ideal fragrance to spray on your wool scarf, and I agree it's perfect for layering) and a bundle of beautiful beeswax candles. Both will go a long way towards making the bitter Boston winter warm. 
• The weird, unseasonable warmth in Wisconsin meant that I could smell more manure than usual in winter, when the ground is often frozen. For reasons not exclusively olfactory, I dread the completion of a harrowingly gigantic factory farm under construction right off the highway on the route between my hometown and Madison. (The cows, I heard, are on their way from Nebraska in the new year. Not that I'd prefer Wisconsin cows meet their fate in such a place, but I'm puzzled as to why the Dairy State needs to import its livestock.)
• Alterra Coffee! I visited the main roasting facility on Humboldt, and wanted to set up permanent shop at one of the tables, eating pie, breathing in toasty beans, and talking all day with old friends. 
• A friend had a Mrs. Meyer's Iowa Pine candle going in her bathroom, and I was teased for emerging from the bathroom more than once exclaiming how great it smelled in there. The candle seems to be sold out all over, but I'll be keeping an eye for one out next winter.
• Oh man, if you're ever in Iowa, do yourself a favor and purchase some AE French Onion dip. You may be thinking, I've tried french onion dip in a tub before, and it's not that great. I agree! It usually isn't, but this stuff is so delicious that dipping your chip so deep that your hand comes out creamy is one of my family's most sacred holiday traditions. Viva Midwest!

new york notes

 Your nosy host poses with our mascot at the Sensorium exhibit. 

We spent this past weekend in New York, and smelled winter. On Saturday it snowed on and off all day, big fat wet clumps of snow, turning all the wool I wore wet. But I don't mind that wet wool smell, and I don't mind the first day of snow; it still feels clean, smells like air and mineral. And I love how everybody heats up when they come inside from the cold, how they're stinkier even in some ways than in summer, wearing all those layers, sweat and perfume rising thick off their sweaters. 

Other nosy New York highlights:

• The entryway to my aunt's apartment. Why is it that some homes--some rooms, even--maintain such powerfully specific scents over time? Her foyer was probably the first smell I distinctly associated with New York and, as such, it remains one of the most New York smells I know.
• The Sensorium exhibit, where my favorite part was smelling the "flights of fragrance" in unmarked wine glasses. I liked having so little information about the fragrances (I wouldn't say that I had no information, as the perfumes were organized thematically on four trays: playful, polished, casual, and addictive, and I also knew they were all for sale at Sephora). My other favorite part, and this is very unMidwestern of me to admit, was the tickle of pride I felt when the attendant, Ranfi, remarked that I'd correctly guessed more of the fragrances than some of the perfumers and noses that he'd seen come in and sniff. Apart from my deeply-ingrained aversion to boastfulness, I don't know why it's so uncomfortable for me to admit I am getting better at identifying scents. Of course I am improving; if you smell a lot of fragrances, you get better at remembering and naming those fragrances. And wasn't that part of the point of starting this blog in the first place? To improve my fragrance vocabulary, to reduce the number of times when identifying a scent is, as it so often becomes, frustratingly similar to the experience of hearing a melody to a song you can't name, or having the right word forever on the tip of your tongue.
• We finally made it to MiN New York, a gorgeous little store that feels like the well-appointed personal library of a fragrance-obsessed, tweed-wearing grandfather. The beautiful built-in bookshelves displayed all sorts of fragrances--many lines I'd never had the chance to smell before--and, book-related bonus, MiN is super close to two actual (and awesome) bookstores: Housing Works and McNally Jackson. 
• At MiN, my husband fell pretty hard for the Parfum d'Empire line. He just brought the shirt he was wearing when we were there in to the kitchen to have me smell it, and the Fougere Bengale he'd sprayed still lingered. It smelled warm and alive, like it could take on any weather. 

tree tomato

Before

I had never eaten a tree tomato before visiting Rwanda, but I would happily eat one every day from now on if I could. Tree tomatoes taste tart and sweet, like hibiscus and tomato leaf and maybe pomegranate (though that could be the texture talking). In Rwanda, I also saw them referred to as a plums, 'Japanese fruits,' and prunes. A little online digging reveals they're also known as tamarillos and love fruits. Preeta says that in Malaysia, they eat them by biting off the top and sucking out the seedy insides. I consumed them mainly in juice form, but also as part of fruit salads, and in messy little piles, all by their tangy selves.

One of the best smells I experienced in Rwanda is related, though I don't believe it came solely from tree tomato trees. A powerful tomato-leaf-esque smell seemed to emanate from the hills themselves. I noticed it in particular when riding a bus with the window open or, even better, riding a moto and letting the breeze carry this scratchy green smell straight to me. In the evenings, there was sometimes a nightfire smell that mixed that same tomato leaf aroma with smoke and wood and a little bit of eucalyptus. Green and heady and rich enough to calm you no matter how fast the automobile carrying you is going.

After

programming note no.3: nosy hiatus

Nosy readers! I'm taking a trip to Rwanda and my internet access is taking a dive. The once-weekly Nosy Interview posts will resume on the first Tuesday in September, after I return (hopefully having smelled things I've never smelled before).

nosy postcard, nostalgia express

 fern furling, unfurling

On Monday, I returned from what was probably the second-best-smelling vacation of my life (a trip to Zanzibar tops the list— the place, in my experience so far, is unrivaled in terms of sheer smell-quantity and intensity). This trip was to a small island off the coast of Maine, and it was with a bunch of people I love, and it smelled unbelievable. So good, in fact, that I found myself telling myself (more than once!): reign it in, weirdo, these people do not need to hear you say yet again that it smells SO AMAZING here. But it did! Even toning the nosy down a bit, I do believe I made my husband stick his nose into at least three walls: "Smell this wall!" (old cedar, years of salt air). "Now smell this wall!" (newer cedar, fresh as a clean sheet). "What about this wall?!" (maybe not even cedar, and I'm talking to myself by this point).

 nosy research

A little bit of what else it smelled like, so I can remember: 

summer camp (sleeping bags; closets unopened through winter months; the tiniest bit of moldering in the wall, but the beautiful kind—can something moldering also be fresh? In saltwater air, I think it can be.); wild beach roses; fiddlehead ferns (I have only ever smelled these when they're curled up tight and frying in a pan, not when they're neon green and neon smelling, unfurling upwards and vibrating some bright scent unlike anything I've ever smelled before); cedar (walls old and new, trees, piers); new board game box; screened-in porch; damp towel; sailboat; smoke; Basil gas; lemon; Play-Doh; bowls of melted butter on lobster night; boiled eggs; hot toddies; fish curry; wine breath; garlic-bomb croutons; golden roasting marshmallows and outdoor fireplace; smoke; cool granite; rubber boots; assorted piney smells; and saltwater. Saltwater on skin, in hair, in sheets, in air. Everywhere.  

 what does fog smell like?

home state smells

I spotted this punny t-shirt in Wisconsin, where the olfactory highlights of my visit (aside from the
dairy air) have so far been: 

• homemade cinnamon buns courtesy of tomorrow's nosy interviewee 
• cheese frying up on a griddle at the farmers' market in Madison
• fresh-mown lawn on a breezy summer night
• a bouquet of tiny tea roses and six types of rosemary (also at the farmers' market) 

Food and flowers and feces, Wisconsin you do not disappoint.