Last night, I was sitting in front of the TV, minding my own business and not thinking of anything in particular, when out of the clear blue, the smell of my elementary school cafeteria filled my head. The cafeteria that I haven’t been in in almost 30 years. To which I haven’t given a single thought in almost 30 years.
When I focused on it, I realized I couldn’t physically smell anything, but that the smell was inside my head. Just a memory. I conjured it back for just a moment, then it slipped away again, permanently. Now, I can’t willingly recall it at all.
I’m looking around on the net for stuff about odor and memory, but it’s pretty tedious. And boring. And I’d rather talk to you guys, so here I am. What do you know about such things? Is there a name for it? Has it ever happened to you?
It’s happened to me, but I don’t know any particular name for it. Once, in a psychology seminar, the instructor read us a list of sensory experiences and had us spend a moment trying to imagine them as vividly possible. I recall being able to call up tastes and smells almost as if they were really there.
I wish I could somehow use this as a weight loss tool–virtual snacking–but it doesn’t seem to work that way.
K-Mart stores used to have delis in them; I’m talking mid-1970s here. The right mix of cheese, meat, and industrial floor cleaner still smells like K-Mart to me.
Reminds me of my grandmother’s china cabinet-she’s been dead for 33 years now 9the cabinet is at my brother’s home). I duck my head inside-take a whiff-and i am back in my Grandfather’s house!
If I happen to smell bologna and bananas at the same time, it’ll take me right back to grade school. The “lunch cabinet” where we all put our brown bag lunches reeked of warm bologna and overripe bananas. In summertime, when it was opened at noon for us to rummage, the reek could knock you over.
There are certain smells that take me right back to my visits to India, which I loved and which were the happiest times in my teenage life. For a moment it’s like snap! I’m there. And then I’m back.
Yes, there the plastic lunchbox smell that instantly transports me back to grade school. I have a huge fondness for the comforting smells of Play-Dough and plasticine. And there is a smell of vinyl, like the kind from inflatable pool accessories, like water-wings, that I always find comforting because it reminds me of lazy summers from my pre-school days.
While working out in the basement, I spy the Miller Beer boxes in the corner that my parents used to store records in. I go over and they smell woody…and immediately remind me of the smell of the back of the wife’s hobbycar: a 1966 Cadillac Hearse. It also has a gorgeous wood floor, which is something I guess I don’t often smell.
Diesel fumes take me back to first grade. Our normal school bus was bus 6: it was one of the newer ones, and really nice for a school bus. But there were days when it was taken out of rotation for field trips and stuff, so we’d get bus 4. Bus 4 was a diesel burning demon from the deepest pits of Hell. It had been around so long that my mother rode it, and had written “Helen loves Tommy” on the back wall. You could hear it coming before it crested the hill, and smell it coming for longer.
Even now I can remember the peculiar, indescribable smell that always hit me when I walked into my paternal grandparents’ back porch, on our annual trips to southern Missouri to visit them throughout my earliest childhood. I haven’t smelled it since I was eleven (when my widowed grandmother died), I’ve never smelled it anywhere else and probably never will as long as I live, can’t identify its source(s) or describe it well enough that it could be recreated, and so can’t say in what sense exactly I “remember” it, but I do, and it’s all bound up in the visual memory of that wooden back porch seen from the perspective of my three-foot-tall self, and the emotional memory of relief at the end of a two-day road trip that finished up going through the Ozark foothills on two-lane blacktop, talk about carsick!, and joy at the prospect of a week’s playing on the propane tank out back and the swing in the vacant lot next door and with the neighbor kids and their donkey, and there are my grandparents’ waists and their arms stretching toward me for the obligatory hug, and that odd but not-unpleasant sour-woodsy smell that always made me think of berries, somehow.
This. in 4th, 5th and 6th grades I went skiiing every weekend through a program through the local Rec. Center…Smelling idling busses takes me back there.
I’m 23 and very rarely, maybe once or twice a year, I get a whiff of a smell that is something along the lines of baking and either cleaner or something that has a metalish smell (like… oh… its so tough to describe… its a weird mix).
It brings me back to a specific day in Kindergarten and I can relive almost second for second three scenes of that day. Going to the BOCES kitchen (in the same building) and cooking cupcakes. The second is getting off the bus and being jokingly tackled by my dad and wrestling him in the yard then realizing “OH NO! I HAVE CUPCAKES IN MY BACKPACK!” The third is being by the dinner table and eating crushed cupcakes with my parents while we all decided that they were still really good even if they were a bit smooshed.
I can only recall about a second from each part but when I get that smell that was in that kitchen somehow stuck in my head from some trigger the whole thing comes back.
When I was looking for an MGB to replace one I sold 15 years earlier, I test-drove one a guy was selling on eBay. The smell hit me as I got in, and I thought to myself ‘This smells like an MGB!’ The one I have now smells the same. And I used to have a '48 Willy CJ-2A. When I got my '46 I had the same reaction.
When I was kid, my mother made curtains for the living room and dining room. shw worked hours and hours making those curtains and she was very proud of them.
We moved out of that house in 1973. Several years ago, my sister bought a new house and I went to visit. When I walked in the house, I said to her that this house smelled like the one when I was a kid. As I toured the house, in her master bedroom she had those curtains, which I didn’t even know that she had. I recognized the aroma of those curtains, immediately as I entered the house, 25-30 yrs later.
My family had an air freshener in the early 80s that was attached to the wall and you could spray the scent by pressing on it. Every once in a while I’ll get a whiff of something that smells like it and I always think of “The One Thing” by INXS.
Does anyone else associate smells with songs, too? Or is it just me? My husband thinks that’s weird, but I can’t be alone, right?
There is a certain type of roll made from yeast dough that will take me back like a shot to a restaurant in Houston, TX, and I can actually see clearly in my mind’s eye the waiter bring the bread tray. The thing about this is that meal was sometime during the summer of 1936.
I think this was the same day we saw the first release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. In Technicolor and with air conditioning! Heaven!!
