If I ever lost my sense of smell, I feel like I'd be losing a really important piece of how I experience the world and things around me. I feel like more often than not I associate scents and fragrances with people that I know, places that I've been, or very specific memories that I have from my past. For example, there's a time in the spring transitioning to summer time where I get a whiff of something. I don't know exactly what the scent is. But when I do smell it, it takes me back to when I was in high school and I was an exchange student in Japan, and it takes me back to that moment where I'm walking around the streets in Tokyo, Japan in high school. I also kind of relate smells and fragrances to people that I know and I'm like, oh, this is my friend's smell, and then it also takes me back to specific memories that I've had with them before. I know that when summer is coming, there's a certain scent that I get and I'm like, oh I know, summer is coming, like summer is on its way. I also like to think about how in the future, when I have my own home and family that my family home is going to have a certain smell and it's just exciting to me to think about how when people come over, they are going to think, oh, that's that family's smell.

It's meant a lot to me to participate in this project because I live alone with my dog in Perry, Georgia, a small city, and I have been in self-imposed solitary confinement for most of the past months, since the pandemic was declared in March 2020. So, being able to talk to the Michigan Diaries has given me a listening ear of people who are interested in what I have to say. And that's been a source of great psychological support to me during this difficult period. Also have appreciated the $5 gift certificates that you have sent me every time I give you a recording of at least 15 minutes. I went to the library this past Friday to get some help from one of the librarians in copying all those gift certificate IDs over from my email in to my Amazon account. And I was impressed to discover that since I started participating in this study last fall, you have paid me $75 and all in gift coupons to Amazon. That's an impressive amount of money and I do appreciate it and one of your previous emails to us participants, you ask how we were spending our gift certificates. Well, my answer to you is that I'm saving the money up and I haven't quite decided yet how to spend it, but I think I might just spend it on buying electronic books from Amazon.

Okay, close your eyes and take a deep breath through your nose. What can you smell? Well, I'm kind of stuffy because of all the doggone pollen. I have a bowl, sitting here next to my computer cuz I work from home today. I have a bowl that needs to go in the sink but it smells like mayonnaise. It's all 'cause I had—It was a chicken salad that I made as a meal. I also smell my wax, my hot wax, that you put in your your smelly waxes its Rice Krispies very sweet-smelling. I can smell that. Smells good though.