Super Sniffer

The Pacific Northwest's (PNW) fresh air uplifts me. I breathe in, and it feels clean, light, and pure. In places where the weather is quite humid, the air is hard to breathe and, weighs on your lungs, feels heavy to inhale. If it is an especially humid day in the PNW, it is harder to take a breath, and I notice it.

As I walk outside, I am aware that I only have a smidge of a dog's smell receptors, but my sniffer is quite acute and mostly accurate. Dogs have one hundred million receptors, while people have around six million.

Odors waft on the breeze; it could be a scent of rain coming or a cold night; it could be decayed leaves or cedar chips - all welcome scents.

Odors also waft from homes on my neighborhood walks. These odors can be ones that make you salivate if someone is grilling their dinner. Based on the advertising companies, smells can also be flowery odors that so many feel are necessary to use in their homes and laundry.

They have bought the lies and the products.

It used to be Lysol, Pine-Sol, Chlorox, and Bounce Dryer Sheets. Now, it is Fabreze or Tide Pods and other flowery fragranced products for laundry. Persil detergent is the worst. Add BAKING SODA to the wash. It removes odors (way better than Persil will), boosts cleaning power, freshens and softens fabrics, and can be a spot cleaner. Baking Soda freshens and deodorizes laundry and the washing machine.

Those odors are displeasing to the olfactory experience of an outdoor walk. Expecting to be met with a whiff of roses or a freshly mowed lawn, it is annoying to smell everyone's laundry products. It flows out of the dryer vents simultaneously of many homes, and I am surrounded by a cloud of unwanted forced yuck as I walk.

CLEAN HAS NO ODOR, NO SMELL!

Walking along, breathing deeply, I am suddenly gagged by a human-made chemical and flowery odor that does not belong! I want to bang on doors and confiscate their products; unfortunately, I cannot.

Why do people buy into the false idea that fragranced clothes and rooms are better? There are fragrance-free products that work as well and don't permeate clothing with a smell that is IMPOSSIBLE to remove and could be harming the lungs of all living beings in the household.

Yes! Did you think of that? All of these chemicals, sprays, and additives affect your body. Are these substances why there seem to be more people with asthma and allergies now?

I made the mistake when traveling using detergent available where I stayed and then had to get rid of the clothes when the "fresh" odor stuck to the fibers and was impossible to remove.

My nose detects the same flowery, unpleasant odor in people's clothes as they walk by, wave their arms, or worse, want to hug me. It seems ninety percent of people are using the same damned stinky detergent, and I will always be subjected to it because the fabric is plastered with it. A new wash only increases it!

What about the poor outdoor creatures? Why must they be subjected to further human thoughtlessness by the imposition of odors into their wild world?

Let's move on - there is the skunk weed smell. Yeah, you know who you are. Try an edible instead so we don't have to smell the skunk smell. More importantly, why is it okay to sit in the driver's seat of your vehicle in the mall parking lot, toking? You have to drive, and it is illegal to be on drugs while driving.

The weed-packaging plants that I drive by plague my nostrils, too. It didn't smell like this back in the day, I'm telling you, it did NOT! The outdoor air didn't smell bad except for an occasional factory or a vehicle with no muffler. Weed had a sweet odor, not the overpowering skunk roadkill smell.

I have never been able to go into a store that has incense burning. It makes me feel like I am suffocating. Light fragrances of candles or certain essential oils (and I MEAN LIGHT) are fine. Usually, in a massage place, I tell them no fragrance because I have no idea if what they will light, burn, or use in the oil will be offensive.

In the old days BC (before Covid), when we went to the movies regularly, I had to move seats if some ignorant woman who bathed in her perfume sat near me. I know people who used to smoke, and I couldn't breathe when they got into my vehicle with their nicotine-laden clothing. (Likewise, after smoking a joint.)

Cooking odors are banned from my kitchen because they spread through the vents and waft into every corner. Anything that I know will do that is cooked outside.

It can be distressing to pick up on all these odors. Masks can help; I found that out during Covid. I wish healthy lives for all, with fewer fragrances and chemicals affecting people and wildlife.