The Smell That Never Fully Leaves the Workshop

There’s a smell in the workshop, borax and tanning solution mostly, with hide paste underneath it when I’ve got something drying, that I genuinely don’t register anymore. I’ve been told by more than one visitor that it hits you the second the door opens, and I believe them, because I remember it hitting me too back when I was starting out and hadn’t built up whatever tolerance lets you stop noticing your own workspace. Now I could probably not smell it if you asked me to try, and if you asked what smell I like that other people might consider weird, honestly, this would be it.

What brought this back to mind wasn’t work at all, it was a game, one I won’t name specifically since I don’t think it’s fair to make an entire review out of one sentence in a rulebook, but there was a passage describing a room that had gone unused for years, dust and preserved things and a specific staleness, and something about the phrasing put me right back at the workbench the first month I worked here, before the smell became invisible to me. That’s a strange thing for a piece of cardboard and printed text to do, reach past the game itself into an actual sense memory.

I’ve thought about this more than the moment probably deserves, why a description in a rulebook would do something a photograph of my own workshop wouldn’t. I think it’s because smell doesn’t really have the same defense mechanism vision does. I can look at my own workshop every day and stop seeing it, the way you stop seeing a room you live in. But a sentence describing a smell doesn’t ask your eyes to do anything, it goes around whatever filter I’ve built up and lands somewhere older.

I don’t think I’ll ever get that first-month awareness back, not really, not permanently, you can’t unlearn familiarity with your own workspace on purpose. But I like that it’s still in there somewhere, ready to get triggered by an unrelated sentence in an unrelated book, proof that some part of the beginner who first walked into this garage is still paying closer attention than I usually give him credit for.