Thief of fragrances

I still laugh whenever I remember that flower shop named “Petal Attraction” somewhere in Quezon City. I still think it is still the wit to beat in this league of name-calling. That shop has long disappeared but it does not matter. There are other flower shops that took its place in the area. We assure ourselves that no matter how many flower shops disappear, there will always be flowers. And there seems to be so, still a lot of them, especially on Valentine’s Day and All Soul’s Day. But Pablo Neruda, the poet whose odes to flowers inhabit a good portion of the terrain of his poetry, would have trembled in anger and sorrow if he came across these new findings.

The flowers are losing their fragrance. Not that they no longer emit what he put in verse as “pulsacion de su perfume” (pulsations of perfume) but their smells no longer go the distance. Its journey to the waiting noses of other creatures, including those that flowers depend on to scatter their seeds — Neruda’s “proletariat” bees that enter and exit “windows of perfume” — are cut short. But what could possibly stop the journey of the fragrance of a flower?

Fragrances are composed of molecules that are volatile enough to evaporate and disperse in the air. These traveling molecules reach other creatures and if they can smell, will recognize it to be such. Different smells would mean different things to different creatures. The recent findings from the journal Atmospheric Environment, conducted by researchers in the University of Virginia, show that the scent of flowers in surroundings with polluted air traveled much shorter distances that the ones in unpolluted times (1800s). In fact, they found that now in polluted air, the journey of the fragrance of flower could only reach about 20 percent of that distance it once traveled. It seems that pollutants bind with the flowers’ scents, dramatically changing their molecular shape, which to the sense of smell of sniffing creatures effectively means the loss of the original fragrance that formed part of the story of survival.

Aside from poets who coax their muses from floral wonders losing their way in verse, we have other creatures losing their way. Insects like bees have to travel longer and longer distances to find the flowers that they suck. Because of this, many may not make it to the journey. And this is what the researchers suspect is the cause why bee populations have been decreasing.

I can think of many reasons to curse the polluted city about. My asthma is on top of that list. Not only does pollution take away my capacity to breathe with ease, it has also slowly taken away the fragrances that are worth breathing for. This lends a sadder air to the melodic sentiment, where have all the flowers gone?

Since scents have been scientifically proven to be the best bookmarks of our memories, what we have probably not realized yet is that pollution might have slowly taken away our power to remember bits and pieces of the story of our lives, especially in the cities where pollution has become a way of life. I was in Thailand recently and I received generous strings of what smelled like sampaguita. It smelled of home, of my grandma who always had it in her pocket or on her neck when I was a little child constantly asking her for stories. I realized how long it has been since I smelled sampaguita, of how long it has been since its fragrance brought me to a good place in my past.

We always think of cities in terms of sight and sound and seldom, of smells. We always think of pollution as the culprit that robs us of our health. We never thought of it as something that robs us of our memories, of our souls. Maybe we should start doing so. Maybe we could recover part of the sanities we seem to have lost by cleaning city air and planting more flowers. Maybe we will remember our better selves when we once again succumb to the lure of petal attraction.

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