So there was this one time that I almost blew up a cabin.

It was 2009 and I was visiting my sister in Chile and we'd rented a cabin in the mountains

to go hiking.

I thought I was cooking onions.

I was standing there by the stove and I started coughing a lot and that's when I noticed

that the onions weren't cooking and realized that I hadn't actually lit the stove.

I looked around, I found some matches, I was just about to light it when my sister came

and running into the house screaming at me to tell me that she could smell what I couldn't,

which was that I had accidentally filled the whole cabin with propane gas.

My name is Brooke Jarvis and I'm a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine.

And for this week I wrote a story about the coronavirus and smell since loss of smell

is one of the strangest symptoms of the virus.

I don't have a functioning sense of smell, I don't ever remember having a sense of smell,

I don't know what it means really to smell something except by watching the people around

me react to smells.

I don't notice when something is fishy, I don't notice if somebody has farted and every

person that I've ever lived with has been kind enough to allow me to ask them over and

over again to smell the armpits of my sweaters to let me know if they need to be washed.

It's something that I'm very used to and I don't stress about it, but I have also started

taking a propane detector with me sometimes when I travel.

Compared to our other senses that we've understood the basics of them, things like hearing

and vision for decades or centuries even, smell is something that we're only beginning

...