Ah… this smells wonderful.
The sweet, rich fragrance filled my senses.
I had been wondering what to drink. I had already spent an hour writing at a cafe over a hot Americano, and on my way home, I had picked up an iced Americano for my daughter.
She had left her coffee on the dining table and was wandering around the living room, coming back now and then for a sip before walking off again.
It wasn’t time to prepare lunch yet. I considered having another coffee, but I didn’t really feel like it.
Then I remembered the black tea I hadn’t touched in a while. I reached for a tin of English Breakfast, but changed my mind and opened the Strawberry Cream Tea instead.
The leaves released a sweet scent as I took them out.
I was steeping the tea leaves in a glass teapot when my daughter said, “That smells nice.”
My husband had just gotten up and sat down at the dining table, looking rather drained.
“I drank too much…”
“Yeah, two late nights of drinking in a row.”
He mentioned that he had a lunch appointment, then sat there for a while before eating the boiled eggs and apple I had left on the table.
He hadn’t been drinking for a while. Maybe he’d been holding back…
I went into the bedroom, opened the windows wide to let in some fresh air, and placed my tea on the desk before opening my laptop.
It’s almost as if I’m drinking the fragrance itself…
With each small sip, the flavor of the tea spread through my mouth, and its aroma seemed to fill my nose.
I’ve really become much better at noticing smells…
I smiled to myself.
I had never had a particularly good sense of smell. I thought I was simply insensitive to smells. In fact, I don’t think I had ever paid much attention to them in the first place.
An Unusual Assignment
When I started working as a newspaper reporter, this turned out to be surprisingly useful.
As part of my training, I was assigned to report directly to a police station for a week.
“There’s an autopsy of a man who died in a fire. Go and observe it, then write down the steps of the procedure and submit your report.”
That was the assignment my senior reporter, who covered that police station, gave me.
It was the first time I’d ever seen an autopsy.
“She’s a reporter. She’s here to observe.”
The chief detective said this to a staff member as we entered the autopsy room together. The staff member had been about to stop me, a young-looking woman who didn’t seem to belong there.
I was focused entirely on my assignment.
Write down every step of the autopsy accurately.
I simply watched and recorded the procedure in order.
Then, suddenly, several people nearby cried out and stepped backward, covering their noses with their hands.
I wondered what had happened and moved closer to get a better look.
Strangely enough, I couldn’t smell a thing.
I had no idea that the chief detective was watching me as I stood there, calmly taking notes as if nothing unusual were happening.
That afternoon, I returned to the newsroom and handed my report to my senior reporter.
The other reporters on the social affairs desk looked at it and burst into laughter.
One of them said, “You didn’t miss a thing.”
What’s so funny?
My senior reporter said nothing about my work, so I assumed I had done a good job. I was quite pleased with myself.
It wasn’t until about two years later, when I started dating that senior reporter, that I discovered the whole assignment had been a prank.
I was the first female reporter the newspaper had hired in three years, and the reporters often went out for dinner together after work. Over time, we grew close, and eventually we got married.
The funny thing was, two male reporters had joined the newspaper at the same time I did, but neither had been given an assignment like mine. I was the only one who had been sent to observe an autopsy.
“If you don’t see an autopsy during training, you probably never will. Reporters don’t usually go out of their way to watch one,” my husband later said with a laugh.
“Yeah, thanks to you, I had quite an experience. When else would I ever get to see an autopsy?” I said, laughing too.
Back then, my husband was the only unmarried reporter on the social affairs desk. I also remember how I ended up at his police station in the first place.
At a dinner gathering, the head of our police reporting team assigned the three trainee reporters to different police stations. Since we had to report early in the morning, he said he’d place us at stations close to home.
Then he assigned me to the station my husband was covering.
The senior reporters laughed.
But there’s another police station closer to my home…
That was what I thought, though I simply followed the instructions.
On my first morning there, I walked into the chief detective’s office and found my husband sitting on a sofa, looking sleepy.
“These were left over at the bar last night, so I put them in my pocket. Here, have them.”
He pulled two tangerines from his pockets and handed them to me.
I simply took them and handed him the morning newspaper I had brought from home.
He took it and gave me my assignment—to observe an autopsy.
A Change I Hadn’t Expected
“What’s that smell?” my husband asked, frowning.
“Does something smell?” I asked.
I searched through some ingredients stored in a corner and discovered that the vegetables had completely rotted.
“Can you smell it?”
I asked my daughter as we waited for the elevator.
“Just a little,” she answered.
I got into the elevator with the garbage. If the smell had been strong, I would have felt uncomfortable if someone from another floor had gotten in with me.
Not being able to smell things very well could be convenient sometimes, but inconvenient at other times. That was why I often asked my family whether something smelled.
“That cigarette smell is terrible. Someone must have lit a cigarette before getting out of the elevator.”
I said this to my daughter a few days ago as we were taking the elevator downstairs.
“It’s even worse than Dad’s cigarette smell.”
“You’re right. I guess he really did switch to milder cigarettes, just as he said. This smell is awful.”
It struck me that I had noticed the smell before my daughter did.
“Should we open the windows? The air feels a bit stuffy,” my son asked one late morning.
I smiled and answered, “It does feel a little stuffy, but your sister is drinking iced coffee, so she’ll get cold if we open the windows now. I’ll leave the windows wide open when we go out in about thirty minutes.”
He went back to his room.
I had always thought I wasn’t particularly sensitive to my surroundings.
But perhaps I wasn’t naturally that way at all. Perhaps I had simply closed myself off from my senses, believing I could adapt easily to almost any environment.
A Different Pace
“Don’t you think we’ve all been doing a lot better since we moved here?” my daughter once said.
I agreed with her. A great deal has changed since we moved here in February of last year.
Before that, we had lived in an officetel in central Seoul. Our new home is on the outskirts of Daegu. There are cafes, restaurants, and convenience stores right outside our apartment complex, yet mountains surround the area and a river flows nearby.
“Everything seems to move at a slower pace around here,” my husband once said. “It’s so relaxing. I really like it.”
The air around our old place in Seoul had been pleasant, and there was a nice breeze there, too. But the air here feels better than anywhere else I’ve lived. When I open the windows, the wind comes down from the mountains and flows right through our home.
We live on the top floor of an apartment building. Warm sunlight fills our home, making it feel bright and cozy. Even our rubber plant, which hadn’t grown at all during our year and a half in the Seoul officetel, began putting out new leaves after we moved here.
There is no noise from neighbors upstairs. Four adults share this spacious home—my husband, our grown daughter and son, and me—but we each have enough room to live comfortably at our own pace.
If we had moved back to our old, bustling neighborhood in Daegu instead, I don’t think we would have felt any of this.
I began writing here.
I started noticing how often I had put aside my own wishes and moved according to what my family needed, believing that was simply what it meant to care for them.
Instead of automatically doing what I thought I should do, I began paying attention to what I actually wanted at that moment.
One summer day, I noticed the sound of the wind coming down the mountainside for the first time, and it made me happy.
Another time, I was delighted to find a butterfly that had spent the night resting on the screen of our balcony window.
Last April, when a golf pro suggested that I try my first evening round on a full-length course in the mountains, I went along. I had been so worried about feeling cold that I had carefully packed hand warmers, only to find myself in short sleeves, delighted by the cool mountain breeze.
I used to drink coffee throughout the day. I sold the coffee machine I loved so much simply because I wanted to cut back on caffeine. Looking back, that small decision may have helped me discover other drinks and a wider range of flavors and aromas.
How could the same person change so much…?
Even I find it amazing.
