Item

The Whir and the Waft

Title (Dublin Core)

The Whir and the Waft

Description (Dublin Core)

When schools shut down, there was a transition period where teachers waited to find out what they would need to do next. When that was decided, our work week was drastically changed. To achieve equity, we gave 30 minute lessons over Google Meets to anyone who wanted to show up twice a week. This meant a lot of free time--which meant reading!

I went to the local bookstore and there was a line: only 5 people allowed in the massive 1-block building at a time. When I was permitted entrance to the silent space, I had to accept hand sanitizer from an automatic dispenser. This was not my first encounter with the substance, but it was the most memorable. The machine whirred and spit an enormous amount into my hands, completely filling my palms with watery, reeking sanitizer. I looked around for a towel or space to shake it off...there was so much! It began sliding through my fingers and dripping down my arms, a cold, slow trickle that spread the hospital scent with it. I frantically began rubbing my hands, but even so, huge glops of it splattered on the linoleum floor as I quickly walked to spread the leaking substance more thinly over the floor and avoid creating a puddle. The sterile and unpleasant smell stuck to my skin and followed me throughout the store, into my car, and to the end of my day.

This will be hard to forget, and it made me buy my own, thicker hand sanitizer that I could control, and that smelled like pineapples and mango, and raspberry lemonade (it took some time to order, though, because so many companies were out of product). I didn't realize then, in April 2020, that machines like this would be everywhere, or that upon return to my classroom the next April, I would have my own gallon jug of it to offer students. The smell and the feel of that bookstore experience still make me cringe, yet this scent and substance have been normalized and their presence is expected and sought out. The whir and the waft of alcohol will not leave my senses, and, though they tell an important sensory history of this pandemic, I wish they would.

Date (Dublin Core)

April 10, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Kristen Grosserhode

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Kristen Grosserhode

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

text story

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Education--K12
English Education--Universities
English Health & Wellness

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

teacher
sensory
cold
smelly
library
empty

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

#SensoryHistory
hand sanitizer
Oregon
pandemic teacher

Collection (Dublin Core)

Language & Communication

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Sensory history submissions and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

10/13/2021

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

10/25/2021

Item sets

Covid 19

This item was submitted on October 13, 2021 by Kristen Grosserhode using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://www.covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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