Herself has an extraordinary sense of smell. She could be a super-smeller, which is a real thing. There is a percentage of the population who have a much higher sensitivity to odour than you or me. Me, anyway. My sense of smell is abysmal.
I return home, and to my dulled nose, things are much the same as when I left the house. When Herself gets back, she can tell you what’s been cooked and identify what room the food was consumed in. She can detect spills, even if they’ve been cleaned up, and approximately what time these activities took place at.
If you ever meet her, don’t tell her what you had for dinner. She’ll know as soon as you open your mouth
Sometimes, people accuse Herself of being pathologically clean. But it’s not that at all. All the hoovering and dusting is to ease the torment in her nostrils.
And she can’t turn this ability off, so we have to observe a strict regimen of keeping doors shut and windows open. There are a lot of candles. She also has to exercise superhuman restraint in not blurting out if someone has changed their personal hygiene products or been to the gym and not showered afterwards. If you ever meet her, don’t tell her what you had for dinner. She’ll know as soon as you open your mouth.
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The internal wiring of the human brain is still mostly mysterious, though it has been long established that there is a particular link between smell and memory. And she’s got that too: she can vividly recall every smell she’s experienced from her childhood on. Along with every insult, every compliment, every triumph and failure.
But not all her senses are boosted. After a lifetime of wearing glasses and contacts – and after some years of talking about it – she finally opted to get the eyes lasered.
It was all pretty straightforward. In, zap, and two hours later I was driving her home. Technically, she was supposed to keep her eyes closed, but she couldn’t resist taking peeks so she could read street signs and car numbers. Which was understandable, but also the first sign of the torture (for her) that lay ahead.
Apart from the 18 eye drops a day, the aftercare consisted of doing nothing. She was required to remain in bed, wearing what looked like a pair of joke shop dark glasses. No watching TV. No loud noises. Everyone tiptoed around the house.
Even when I’m pretending to do nothing, I’m sneaking something in there
She had a brief nap, but then the skin-crawling horror began. Herself can’t do nothing. She can’t lie there and think about all the things she would normally be doing, but not do them. This could be a sensory issue. Perhaps she cannot bear to feel the same air moving around her skin. Or perhaps it was the fear of being alone with her thoughts. Whatever the cause, I kept catching her sneaking out of the bedroom, dusting cloth in hand. And then, like the most pitiable addict, she started lying about having to stay in bed all day.
The thing is: I’d be just as bad. I can’t do nothing either. Oh, I talk a great do-nothing game. I’m all for the doing-nothing-is-great-for-mental-health routine. I just don’t do it myself. Even when I’m pretending to do nothing, I’m sneaking something in there.
Herself knows this, and didn’t hesitate to point it out. Things grew a bit tense.
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Compromise has to be creative, and ours was for me to do some hoovering. I hadn’t previously, because the house was supposed to remain quiet. But it wouldn’t be a problem, she assured me. If anything, she would find it comforting. For her, the sound of a vacuum cleaner is like whale song.
It worked, more or less. Later on, she came down for dinner, and only then did I think to ask how she found having laser beams blasted into her pupils. It was fine, she said. “The only surprising thing was the smell. I’ll never forget that.”