Skunk (not as unpleasant as you might imagine). No Pepe Lepews in the general vicinity but I have come upon it in my travels and it reminds me of when it was just a part of the landscape.
A shopping mall, especially during the holidays. This one can make me especially emotional.
A library. They don’t smell *quite *the same as when I was a girl; it seems like there was a certain smell coming from the machine that scanned / photocopied the books when you checked them out. Of course there were the books themselves, and in our main library there was a ball point pen machine, whose brightly colored click top pens had this distinct aroma that I can’t describe, but as a child I adored it.
A swimming pool. They’re ubiquitous here and I have no desire to go in one, but when I was growing up swimming pools equaled vacation.
Love’s Baby Soft perfume ,or any popular perfume from the 70s and 80s. You don’t really get to smell them out in public that often, but sometimes at a discount type of store they might carry Exclamation, or Poison, or if you’re really lucky, Loren.
A new house. This must go back to being little and the smell of our newly built house. The carpet, and paint and whatever else building components. Again, I have little reason to experience this very often these days, but when I encounter that just built / carpeted / tiled scent it’s a real jolt.
Violet perfume. My grandmother always wore an apron and kept a scented hankie in its pocket. When I was just learning to walk, I’d pull myself up by holding onto her apron and that pocket was just at my nose level.
Burning leaves in the fall.
Fresh coffee brewing in the morning. I don’t drink coffee, but I sure miss that smell.
The scent of the feed store on a summer Saturday morning.
There have been enough mentions of floral and herbal scents that cause “flashbacks” to periods in my early life that I wanted to clarify why I didn’t include them in my list for “childhood” smells.
The Incense Craze of the late 60’s and early 70’s replaced my childhood associations with those aromas so that now whenever I get a whiff (or an onslaught) of things like Patchouli or Jasmine or Lavender or Honeysuckle or others listed at Descriptive List of Incense and Fragrance including History and How to Use my memories of those scents no longer go back to childhood but to that period of my early adulthood.
There were perfumes and colognes that my relatives would use as preferred scents that I may occasionally associate with them, especially if that’s the only really noticeable scent present. But as a rule, it takes the arrival of the scent itself, not just the name of it, to cause that immediate association with a moment in childhood.
The one that takes me back to high school is White Shoulders. Damn!
Creosote–they used to use it to protect the planks in the boardwalk at the shore. It induces a whole set of smells, like cotton candy, french fries, salt air, etc., so strongly that just for a second, I’m back there.
Tomato vine. Zap! I am in my mothers backyard in 1975 smelling the tomatoes in her garden.
This reminds me of a scene in Harold and Maude:
“Then I became infatuated with these, my odorifics. Give the nose a treat, I thought, a kind of olfactory bandwidth. So I began first with the easiest. Roast beef, old books, mown grass. And Mexican farmyard. Here’s one you’ll like: Snowfall on 42nd Street.” …he sniffs and describes the smells: subway, perfume, cigarettes…snow.
Cedar. My grandparents’ garage smelled like cedar, and it always takes me right back there. Not that I spent a lot of time in their garage- I didn’t- but it does.
Cherry pipe tobacco. My grandfather used to smoke it.
Grass on a warm summer day. Not freshly-cut grass, just the smell of grass when the sun’s been on it.
Frankincense! I was born in 1950 and Catholic until I was 17. I LOVE that aroma to this day, even though all the memories and associations are horrible.
The smell of a big outdoor party. The mix of cigarette smoke, women’s perfume, beer and cooking meat on a grill. Instant flashback to when my parents would take us to those kind of things, usually on Memorial Day and Fourth Of July and Labor Day. We’ get to play with kids outside our usual social circle and the adults were always in a good mood!
Oil of Olay – My mom used OoO face cream nightly and then came to kiss me goodnight. That smell instantly takes me back to being tucked in.
Oil and gas, with exhaust fumes - My dad raced motorcyles until I was about 10. Every weekend in the summer, he packed us all up in his van, drove somewhere within a couple hundred miles, and we camped and watched Daddy race all weekend. I was put down for naps in the back of the van as a toddler, while races (or qualifying heats) were going on. A dozen motorcycles, revving engines maybe a couple hundred yards away… to this day, I can still sleep like a baby with engine noises or smells around me. I can sleep on a plane, or in a car, or at an actual race track (I always fall asleep at Indy races if they’re road races and I’m camped on a grassy hillside or something). Heavy traffic makes me sleepy. (I have to be super extra careful about that – taking frequent breaks, and not driving too long at a stretch, etc.)
Packing boxes and strapping tape. I’m a military brat, and the smell of boxes and tape means time for transitions. There were many, many transitions throughout my childhood.
