As a child, Katherine Ashenburg spent countless hours with her maternal grandmother, a cheerful, industrious German woman. Happy domestic odours of yeast and linen surrounded her, and another odour, a “smell [that] came from my grandmother herself … whom I loved, so the smell never troubled me.”
Years later, visiting Bavaria and meeting bustling German women who worked at guesthouses, Katherine Ashenburg again encountered the smell of her grandmother, now with the nose of an adult. “I knew what the smell was—the muffled, acrid odour of stale sweat—and for the first time I consciously connected my grandmother’s characteristic smell to its cause. She cleaned her house ferociously but not her body, or not very often.” To a child, the odour seemed neither good nor bad, but to the woman, raised in North America and schooled by the...
Margaret Horsfield turned to writing after many years with the BBC as a radio reporter. She is the author of four books, including Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework (Fourth Estate, 1997). She lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
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