Also gasoline. The aroma around gas stations when I was little was very pungent, and they didn’t have these self-sealing pump nozzles like they do today. Everyone used to say they hated the smell but I always liked it.
The smell of jet fuel was always very evocative too, when I was young. I really dug planes and flying; if we went to the airport to meet someone, I’d inhale that aroma and just ache to fly somewhere. Or, on the more infrequent occasions when I was actually going to fly off somewhere myself, it was almost like inhaled eagerness.
The start of a summer rain gets me two ways; on blacktop it smells like my Dad’s machinery shop, where I worked summers as a kid.
On August-dried tall grass it smells like a particular afternoon rainshower when I was repairing sailboats in a field at CYO Camp Gallagher when I was sixteen. I get an absolute Ray Bradbury-esque rush of being young whenever I smell that rain.
Th smell of eucalyptus trees will always make me think about my elementary school, particularly of getting on and off the schoolbus. There is a line of hundreds of the trees planted as a windbreak along the road in front of the school. The eucalyptus nuts were always underfoot, in various states of ripeness, providing plenty of missles to throw at eachother.
About a mile farther down the road there is a whole grove of the trees that must cover 10-20 acres. Our teachers used to take us on field trips into it to study non-native plant species (this was in remote Northern California). Interestingly the only things that seem to grow in the eucalyptus grove are scotch broom and poison oak.
As I read this, I instantly recalled the pungent aroma of the hot exhaust of an F-14 Tomcat as its engines went up to full throttle prior to the catapult sending the plane on its way. Ordinary “blackshoes” such as myself were never around the airplanes, but they allowed us the privilege of going up to “vulture’s row”, a small balcony high on the island of the carrier, to watch flight ops. Even when the air temperature was in the forties, with a cold mist blowing in our faces, those engines would envelop the whole island structure in a wash of eighty degree heat for the brief moments prior to the catapult shot.
I’m certain that if I smell jet exhaust any time in my life, I will be brought back to that same memory.
There’s a certain brand of flyspray used for horses (Repel-X) that flashes me back to hanging around the barn at my summer camp, around age 10-12.
It’s not that popular any more – I smelled it for the first time in many years recently. Blammo, I remembered the packed dirt floor, the bins where feed was kept, the tack room filled with saddles and bridles, the hay loft, everything.