aversions ovenbird The chicken smelled like the banks of the Fraser at low tide when the summer sun turns seaweed and fish bones to putrid fertilizer. I checked the little best before stamp on the package three times, just to be sure. The rot was inexplicable. I kept sniffing hunks of meat, holding thigh muscle stripped of its skin to my nose, detecting something…off. I cooked it anyway. I blamed the smell on a nearby compost plant. I fed it to my family and no one got sick, so it must have been an olfactory error, a sensory processing faux pas. The next day I pulled strips of bacon from a plastic package and ranged them out on a baking sheet. The smell that reached my nose was of rancid fat and decay. I felt nauseous. I cooked the bacon anyway and everyone ate it without complaint though I could barely choke down half a slice. The texture felt wrong on my tongue, gritty rather than smooth. And as my family ate happily I began to think that the wrongness was inside myself. Something had changed. The thought of eating meat of any kind caused bile to rise in my throat. No one tells those with female reproductive systems that when you reach a certain age your body chemistry might shift in such a way that a steak will smell like a dead animal rotting in your wall. No one prepares us at all. I had to learn on my own that low estrogen can alter taste and smell so that meat becomes repulsive and you’ll vow to live on salads until the end of time. The symptoms attributed to perimenopausal hormone fluctuations are countless and varied. I could have a decade to go until this all evens out again. And the dandelions in the lawn are beginning to look delicious. 260505 what's it to you? who go blather from