...the start of a rainstorm, a just-peeled orange, baby shampoo, newly cleaned kitchens, freshly shucked corn on the cob...

I've talked before about how, since I began teaching at BYU, I've begun each class session with a Question of the Day as a way to get to know my students and build rapport. I've been trying to expand my question repertoire now that I'm starting to get students who enroll in my section for both the first and second semester of the two-course sequence, and I feel bad if they get the same set of Questions of the Day both semesters in a row. This semester I added about twenty new questions to my question list, and I've piloted a number of them with varying degrees of success.

My favorite new question this semester by far has been: "What's a smell that you really love?" I was nervous about this one because I was afraid it sounded like a strange question. But when I finally got up the nerve to ask the question I got a wonderful variety of responses. A lot of students went straight to just the smells I would have guessed: cinnamon, rain, homemade bread, freshly cut grass. But many of the responses were delightfully abstract. "The way my apartment smells," one student said. "I don't know why because it's kind of a ghetto apartment, but when my husband and I first open the door after a vacation, it just smells like...I don't know. I just like the smell." Another student said, "I like the way buses smell. You know, sort of...musty." I asked if she had good memories of buses and she looked embarrassed and said, "Yeah, I guess so," in a way that I could immediately tell meant, "No, not at all. I just like how buses smell and I don't know why."

There were a lot of other home smells, lots of spouse smells, a couple pet smells,* and a few weird smells like gasoline. And no one seemed to think the question was weird; they all had a smell, or two, or five that they were eager to share no matter how strange or difficult to describe.

I think smell is an incredibly intriguing sense. If I were asked to contemplate how I experience the world, I would think first about sight, then perhaps hearing, then touch. Smell would rank down with taste, and possibly even below it, not because I don't use it but because I don't use it all the time. My dog is different. He lives in a world of far more complex scents than I do. We go on walks and I wonder what information he is obtaining by sniffing obsessively at a patch of grass that, to me, looks unremarkably like every other patch of grass. If I were to get down on his level, I'm sure that, to me, it would also smell unremarkably like every other patch of grass.

In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes a human subject who awoke one day with this enhanced sense of smell. For some reason, this is the chapter of the book I remember above all other chapters:

Stephen D., aged 22, medical student, on highs (cocaine, PCP, chiefly amphetamines). Vivid dream one night, dreamt he was a dog, in a world unimaginably rich and significant in smells. ('The happy smell of water ... the brave smell of stone.') Waking, he found himself in just such a world. 'As if I had been totally colour-blind before, and suddenly found myself in a world full of colour.' He did, in fact, have an enhancement of colour vision...and a dramatic enhancement of eidetic visual perception and memory.... But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world: 'I had dreamt I was a dog - it was an olfactory dream - and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world - a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell.' And with all this there went a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half forgotten, half recalled.

The summer that I read this book my family held a family reunion in Newport Beach, California. We stayed in a condo near the ocean. On the first day of the trip I walked into the bathroom on the ground floor, next to the kitchen, and the smell of the bathroom - something salty and sandy and unidentifiable - transported me suddenly and overwhelmingly to Madrid, Spain, where I had lived three years before on a spring study abroad program. I spent the next few days trying to place the smell, and trying to understand the feeling that overcame me every time I stepped into that bathroom.

I still find that particular memory strange and haunting, but the experience has repeated itself in my life with other smells and other memories of other places and other times: a fabric smell that evokes a particular corner of my 11th grade English classroom, concrete floors and high basement windows and mismatched chairs and theater props and all; a chilly, rainy, wet-leafy smell that puts me on a run on the Provo River Trail in November a week before Thanksgiving; a mixed smell of Pez candy and club crackers and apples and car interior that makes me instantly five years old and carsick on a trip from Colorado to Utah.

I knew all this, about the power of smell, when I asked the question to my class, and in fact that is precisely why I asked the question in the first place. And yet it still surprised me, just a little, that the question turned out to be the most intimate questions of the entire semester, yielding answers that were unselfconsciously strange and complex and personal and sincere. It was a wonderful question, and I'm excited to ask it again next semester to an entirely new group of students.

* I can relate to this one - I don't like dog smell, but sometimes I will put my face close to Jin's ears and just breathe in the smell, which I think sounds strange unless you've had and loved an animal and know just how comforting and familiar the smell of your own pet can be.