Aromas

I have a hypersensitive olfactory lobe.  Or, in simpler terms, my sniffer is really, really good.  This leads me to smell things many people would go about life without noticing.

This can be beneficial, I can smell many flowers that most people have to practically shove into their nose to smell just by standing near them.  I can smell when rain and snow is drawing near.  I can smell wonderful foods as they are cooking or are fresh out of the oven.  No wonderful candle or scented plug in goes unnoticed by this olfaction observer.  I have detected a smoking plug in in a deserted nearby classroom before, which was very nice considering evacuating 6 children with autism from their routine is always a trial.  I do not have to have the schools lunch menu in order to tell my kids what is for lunch that day. Unscented flower?  Try me!

But, as you can imagine, it also leads to some very unpleasant moments as well.  Those people who bathe in cologne or perfume, the stores that sell a variety of things that in their own right smell good, but when mashed together are just an assault on the nose, must I mention that I drive by a cow field every morning to get to work?  It also came in very handy to discover that someone was smoking in the apartment directly below ours.  Too bad they could not do anything about it.  There are those un godly bad $1 air freshners that people insist on using that give me a headache, but do not seem to bother anyone else!  And never mind blood - I can smell the iron in it.  It makes me queasy.  I went on a give your blood bus once to, well, donate blood, and I couldn't do it.  I almost passed out.  From the smell of the iron.  Not the sight of the blood, I can watch any kind of surgery - heck, I wanted to watch them put stints in my mom, and then in my dad.

So, like most things in life, my superhuman like nasal abilities has its pros and cons.

I hear my husband rustling around in the kitchen.  I'm not really sure what he is doing aside from making a mess considering we just cleaned the apartment.  Then, I see him carrying something toward me, and It looks like a half of a sandwich.  He shoves it toward me and says "Does this smell bad to you?"  Automatically I get a whiff of what smells like rotten eggs mixed with some kind of baby vomit and say "YES! THROW THAT AWAY!"  And he says "Oh okay, well I couldn't really smell anything, I just wanted to make sure."  This is fine, I know I am our home's official smell tester.  I accept that.  But my question is how can you NOT know that it smells bad?  Sometimes I think my husband has quarters stuck up his nose from childhood that were never removed...