Smoldering about smell
For the longest time, I thought the smell was seeping through the painted wall.
I noticed it most at night, while reading in bed. It wasn’t so much a cigarette tobacco odor as a general feeling of smoke. Because I share that wall with my condo neighbor, I thought whoever lived over there was smoking in his bedroom, bad idea, and the smoke was coming through to me.
Some nights it felt like my eyes and nose were burning. More than once, I was so uncomfortable I moved to an upstairs bed, in a room that didn’t share a wall. It was there, too.
This started in September, some three months after I’d moved in. Since then, there are days when I don’t notice the smell and days when it’s distracting enough that I think about where I’d move, if it ever came to that.
When friends visited, I asked them to smell the bedroom. Nobody noticed anything, and that includes Gina, who said she has a nose like a bloodhound. I researched the topic, including questions about smell-blocking wall paint and, before that, whether cigarette smoke can migrate through a wall.
“Unlikely,” said the air quality expert I talked with. He deals mostly with mold, and this is not a moldy smell. He suggested I might have my air ducts cleaned. Have you see what that costs? Geez.
Such is my life sharing a wall. Of all the possibilities, good and bad, that I considered before moving to this condo community, bad smells were not among those reasons. I thought about noise, which has not been a factor, and HOA fees, which are not too terrible. But I hadn’t considered smokers.
Because I pay the homeowners association fee, I gave them a call. They said that the person on the other side of the wall owns the place, and if he’s smoking he’s allowed to do so. If that were a renter, I might have some recourse.
But that seems beside the point. If the smoke isn’t oozing through the wall (and we don’t share a heating system), then what is that smell?
There are medical disorders that can cause a person to sense phantom smells, but I don’t think I have that. The only place I notice this is when I’m in my bedrooms. If my brain were conjuring things, wouldn’t that be happening everywhere else? And can an imagined smell make my eyes turn red? One particularly smelly evening, I decided to move my bed away from that common wall, a task that required all my brute strength as I hoisted the queen mattress and then the box springs and grunted my way though pushing the heavy bed frame across the floor. That night, I could still smell it.
I’ve never smoked, and didn’t grow up or live with people who did. I remember a long plane flight in the ’70s, when everybody smoked and could do it in closed spaces. I thought I was going to gag. Maybe that primed my olfactory cells to be persnickety.
The HOA person suggested I put a friendly note on the neighbor’s door, to inform them that their smoking habit is crossing the border and would they consider – what – smoking on the other side of his house? Quitting altogether?
It was a very gentle note. I taped it to the front door. Two weeks later, it was still there. Could it be nobody lives there? I finally walked over there and took the note back.
As I write this, I can smell the smoke. Somebody around here still has the habit. It’s bad for them, and for me. Don’t they know that?
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.