Sharing Chocolate
On nostalgia, noticing, and… well… noses
“You have to let me know if I stink.”
I’ve hired hundreds of folks at this point in my life, and this is without question the most memorable response to my prompt, “now that you’re on the team, what can I do to support you?”
While I’m not keen to actively sniff the staff, I am tickled by a novel request.
In both the legendary cannon of medical science and the English language very little attention is given to the loss of one’s sense of smell. We get along reasonably well without it, and don’t offer much in the way of proxies aside from jokes about Smell-o-vision. You could argue that olfaction evolved principally for safety - imparting danger cues about forest fire, spoiled food, and death (even now natural gas has added sulfur smell to give us a clue). Maybe you’re more romantic and think about the various pheromones of potential mating partners or the reproductive proclivities of flowering plants. I think about tea, piñon, and chocolate.
Tea has potential for great complexity, and I’ve had the privilege of enjoying street cart chai in India (and in Colorado), and the real Irish stuff on real Irish soil. I have even cultivated a strong preference for expensive Earl Grey, but my roots are so much more essential and frankly basic. My father has always been a two cups of tea a day fellow, and through my youth and most of my 30’s, his brand of choice was the unpretentious yet distinctive Lipton blend of black tea and orange pekoe. I sincerely hope that you have absurd family rituals about smells that you treasure, because mine is still the urgency with which my parents would summon my brother and I to the kitchen when it was time to unwrap the plastic from a fresh box. Occasional visitors were perhaps bemused and often compliant in the ritual of unwrapping the plastic, unfolding the cardboard cover and inhaling deeply as the trapped aroma filled our nostrils. The scent mattered, but moreso the lesson of noticing.
If you’ve spent any time in New Mexico, the word piñon hopefully evokes a strong memory. The air is sufficiently dry in the desert that scents don’t seem to hang or linger, so the background is about as blank an olfactory canvas as you can make in a temperate climate. Prickly pear cacti and rattlesnakes don’t contribute much - just the volatile oils escaping from sage as it desiccates and the resin of the piñon pine.
There’s a strange melancholy for me about Taos and even the healing hot wells of Ojo Caliente, but both are also simultaneously nourishing. The desert seems to dry out an emotional wound in a way that speeds healing process, and so I’ve made a ritual pilgrimage in an enduring rhythm that speeds and slows with the seasons of my life. For quick proxy trips, we have piñon incense at home, and occasionally bring home the piñon coffee which is probably synthetic and made on the same line as the stuff that says hazelnut. No matter, medicine is equal parts chemical and nostalgia in this case.
In the thin slice of 2020 when the world was still as it was, after it had been named but had not yet crossed the ocean my person traveled to Switzerland for work. He wasn’t there long enough to escape the tumult of jet lag, and found himself up on the hill in an expansive park on a rented bicycle in the predawn hours when the entire city’s church bells started. He shared a video of the magic he had been summoned to witness, because the thing about noticing is that its joy is compounded in sharing.
He came home later that day with a small blue box of fancy Swiss chocolates. The box had no legend or key with which to determine the contents, and there appeared to be no duplicates. How would we divide and conquer? Savor and relish? Share equally in anything more creative than our individual palate’s might appreciate?
We elected to share each one - I take a bite, you take a bite - and label the box sharing chocolates, which has become the name of our ritual for noticing and nostalgia, compounded by sharing.
And so today, on the cusp of spring when you might just enjoy something sensual and evocative, I share the obvious notion you may have forgotten. Rituals of sense and scent already live within you or your household. Remember them, and share them, if you’re so inclined? The beauty of scent is that it is both fleeting and vastly sharable - an opportunity to practice true and sincere generosity.
I don’t know what gets us from here to there, through the sticky circumstances of now. But maybe this is part of it.
Onward,
K