The Reader Travels

It’s running. If you hurry, you can catch it.

My allergies have been so bad all my life, I didn’t even realize I had inherited my mother’s intense sense of smell until I was in my twenties. I started going to an allergy doctor because I thought I might be allergic to my fiance’, and like that gray cat that went so well with my mauve carpet, I didn’t want to give him up, despite the infernal itch.

The steroid nose sprays are like magic potion. Suddenly there’s this incredibly vibrant and colorful world around me. I don’t know if I’m reading minds or just smelling the messages in the air. No more anosmatic Annie. The nose is alive.

Sigmund Freud had a lot of theories, one of which was that a person’s sense of smell plays a part in sexual orientation. And Nikolai Gogol shared with us the tale of a runaway nose that left a man’s face of its own volition, making a nuissance of itself all over St. Petersburg. It dressed in a trench coat and disguised itself as a high level official. It’s a very powerful thing this nose.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Russia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.