The smell of the sea shore, specifically the mid-Atlantic US.
My grandparents would rent a cottage and my folks and I, and my cousins’ families, would get together there. We’d hang out, swim, collect jellyfish, whatever. I was one of the youngest of the cousins (and my parents the most frugal and least trendy of the bunch), so these family visits offered a tantalizing and frustrating view into the world of the bigger and more privileged kids. They seemed to me to be grown up and children at the same time. I’d listen to them talking about teenager things and I’d look at the magazines and comic books they brought to entertain themselves ("Dominic Fortune! He’s A Brigand For Hire!) and wonder what made these things so interesting to them.
Then there was the fried fish. My grandmother would buy flounder (caught that morning), and for dinner she’d bread the fillets with “Italian” flavored seasoned bread crumbs and fry them up. I loved fish and fried stuff, and we rarely had either at home. I would eat that fish until i couldn’t eat any more, or until it was gone. I would eat it now. I suppose I could make it for myself, but it would not taste nearly as good, lacking those crucial ingredients, grandma, love, and memories.
But the smell I most associate with my childhood is that of freshly cut grass in the evening. Our garden had a nasty slope at the back so my dad would wait until the end of the afternoon, when the temperatures were getting milder, to mow the lawn. I can still see him wearing only shorts and his old but sturdy gardening boots making his way up and down the slope in the evening sun.
The smell of potatoes boiling always take me back, which is strange really since I don’t remember eating a lot of boiled potatoes, but there you have it.
And schools. It’s been awhile since I’ve entered one, but they have a way of taking me back to my youth.
Lived on a farm from 5-8, and a whiff of diesel immediately sends me back to the old barn with my brother, playing around all of the aging farm paraphernalia, getting into everything we weren’t supposed to.
Now mothballs bring an entirely different memory: Day-one of bootcamp (ugh!)
Coal smoke. I grew up in Mount Pleasant Iowa where they have the Old Threshers Reunion. When I was a kid (mid 60’s to early 70’s) the old steam traction engines still burned coal. I think they’ve long since switched to wood. Now I’m living in the UK and there are still a few houses and pubs that have coal fires so I get to smell it nearly every day in winter.
Calamine lotion. Last year my gf found an old, crusty bottle in her mom’s basement. She brought it home just to ask me to close my eyes and try to identify the smell. Freaked me out. I last encountered the odor 50 years ago, yet could ID it at once.
There’s a paper bag that smells just like the ones they used at the hobby shop I went to with my dad. That smell always makes me feel like I have a new airplane kit to work on.
Maybe not the most normal but happy to me – stale grease and dampness. Reminds me of some of the shacks and hovels I grew up in. We were poor but I never really knew it as we always seemed to have enough and found ways to have fun.
Like a lot of you, lilac and honeysuckle. Japanese honeysuckle, the invasive kind. And diesel. Fresh cut grass, with onions mixed in.
Some that I don’t think have been mentioned yet:
Wallpaper paste (made, I think, from powdered starch–it had a pale bluish color with white marshmallow-looking lumps)
The old-formula smell of certain products, especially Downy fabric softener, Liquid Gold furniture polish in a tall metal container, and Niagara spray starch
I’ll second the smell of an old cedar chest. Also, holly blossoms. As a child, I had a large holly bush right outside my bedroom window. In the spring I would lie at the foot of the bed with my head in the open window to catch the breeze, going to sleep with the smell of the holly blossoms all around.
Rosemary. It was about the only herb my mother used, as my father was a meat and potatoes kind of guy who didn’t like “gook” food (as he called anything that wasn’t meatloaf and the like). She put it in her spaghetti sauce and her peroshki. While I’m sure there must have been some other herb in her cupboard, I wasn’t aware of them.
The first thing I planted when we moved to Portland was a rosemary bush. Whenever I go out and cut a sprig or two, it reminds me of her.