Day 46 ~ One Year, One Nose

What's that smell?

That smell that can only be defined by a single word: garbage. We all know the smell. We've all smelled that smell. I can only assume that my garbage isn't exactly like your garbage, but somehow all garbage smells the same. My garbage might have a dirty diaper in it, or old coffee filters, or burnt macaroni and cheese, or a half-eaten cupcake (as if anyone here would eat only half a cupcake!), or -- gah! -- the contents of an ashtry, while yours may contain entirely different 'things', but through some weird chemistry I don't understand, it manages to smell the same, with, perhaps, differing fragrance 'nuances'.

Now I'm really going to gross you out. When I was a little kid, say three or four, I remember playing in the garbage in the big burn bins behind our farmhouse. Before the weekly burn, I'd rush to the burn bins with a box and go through the garbage, picking out cans that still had labels, empty mayonnaise jars with the remnants of mayo becoming opaque and rank, beer bottles and cake boxes and whatever else I thought was salvageable, so I could clean them up and use them to play 'grocery store'. Mayo jars were the worst. Never a more disagreeable scent has been pulled from the trash that was once considered food than the sweaty, fully sauna-fied, soured innards of a mayonnaise jar. In some respects, all garbage has at least one of these qualities, if they can be classified as such.