I bought a couple of pairs of pj’s today, one at my local Target, the other at a Goodwill Shop (Op Shop here in Aus). I should have gone to the op shop first, because the pair in Target cost me $40 whilst the pair at the Oppo was just $3.00!!
But anyway, the op shop pair smells just like my Nanna’s nightie from back in the 1960’s. It’s frigging identical, and I can’t stop myself from shoving a handful of jammie flannel into my schnoz.
OMG, what a comforting scent it is. All I can guess is that these pyjamas were washed in pure soap like my Nan used to wash in…a rarity now with all the commercial washing powders/liquids available.
Yeah, my mum used to use Lux flakes for flannels, face clothes and towels. And she had a big jar of home made liquid wool wash before such a thing existed commercially.
For some unfathomable reason, smell memories are extremely powerful and evocative, more memorable than other senses. I’m sure most of us have latent “smell memories” that we’re not consciously aware of but that would evoke powerful recollections when we detect them. I know that for me, the smell of pine trees is one of them, which evokes both our country cottage, which was surrounded by large pines that emitted their beautiful aroma after a rainfall, and Christmas time when Dad would bring a fresh-cut pine tree into the house.
My Dad loved his pipe. He taught me how to smoke a pipe. And while I know about tobaccos, and blends, and whatnot, and I love expensive blends; sometimes I find myself falling back on the basic drugstore tobaccos that my Dad enjoyed so much. Maybe not the best pipe aromas, but memorable aromas nonetheless.
Any whiff of cream and sugar always reminds me of my ice cream-obsessed grandpa. He was the only able-bodied person I’d ever met who ordered ice cream to his front door. The box of ice cream he’d bought at the store was never quite enough.
National Geographic Magazine covered this phenomenon in a 1986 article; ‘The Intimate Sense of Smell’. There’s a bit of info about it here: sense of smell
I wouldn’t be snorting up the smell of granny pyjamas, but each to their own.
Rosemary. It was an herb that my mother loved and she used it liberally in her spaghetti sauce. One of the nice things about Portland was that rosemary flourished there and a lot of people used them as ornamental shrubs. Every time I passed one, I’d rub my fingers on the leaves to get that aroma.
Whenever I smell pipe tobacco wafting off of someone, I always think to myself (and say it out loud it one of my sisters is around to get the reference), paraphrased, ‘I’m making a memory, pipe tobacco and peppermint’.
Here’s maybe kind of an odd one: my wife bought some sort of body wash that she kept in the shower. I’m not really a body wash guy, usually just use plain old soap, but I loved the smell of this stuff and it reminded me of some smell from my past I just couldn’t place.
Then I figured it out. When I was a kid, my dad had a coin bank that was a little cedar barrel he put mostly pennies into. He’d let me pour the pennies out and look for years and mint marks of pennies that might be valuable. I went through the pennies several times over the course of maybe a couple years. I found an Indian head nickel in there he let me keep. The body wash smell was the exact combo of old copper pennies and cedar.
My grandmother smelled of Eau de Rochester [lilac, we are the lilac city =) ] and lavendar and vanilla. I am sure the lavender and vanilla were from some notion, potion or lotion she used, and I used to have a small bottle of the eau de rochester but it died in my house fire =(
At one point in my childhood, my folks were house-shopping (tho they never found what they wanted and didn’t move till years after I’d left home.) There was one house that I remember as being dark inside and having a distinctive smell. It was long after when I was making my first quiche that I recognized the scent. Such an odd memory-trigger.
I have a few. My father’s father had an impressive model train setup in the basement, that he’d wired entirely himself (he was an EE). When it was running, it produced a smell that was a mix of hot insulation and ozone. It’s about the only thing that I remember about him.
On the other side, my mother’s mother was an excellent cook, and used apple cider vinegar in a number of my favorite dishes of hers. I’ll occasionally still open up a bottle just to sniff and be reminded of her.
And my mother is quite the gardener, and I always think of her when I smell tomato plants (the green parts of the plant itself, not the fruits). Tomato plants smell wonderful, and it’s a shame that they’re toxic, so they can’t be used as an herb.
I have been surfing the north side of Morro Rock pretty regularly for the last 15 years. You can expect some really fun rides when the generally NW wind shifts so that it’s coming from the SW; roughly from the rock…which is a bird sanctuary. Alas, I now find myself invigorated by the smell of bird shit.
My dad was a fireman. We visited him many times at the station-as a kid I got to climb on the rig and pretend to drive. Years later, in another state, I happened to visit a local fire station that was having a picnic fundraiser.
It came back instantly-the same smell. Damp rubber mostly but very distinctive.
Lilacs are starting to bloom around here and the smell always brings me back to when I was a little kid; the first house I lived in (until age 9) had a lilac bush.
Our maids when growing up in the 60’s used Murphy’s Oil Soap on a regular basis, so I constantly was exposed to it as a child, and that horrendous lye smell is still buried deep in my subconscious.
A couple of weeks ago, The Far Side ran an old cartoon about an older worker warning a newbie at a lye plant to always mind his step around the open-topped vat, because she is always “full of lye!” I instantly thought of Murphy’s Oil Soap as I then put on my workout duds…
I walk into the workout room here at my apartment complex, and instantly smell the stench of Murphy’s Oil Soap pervading everywhere, where one of the office girls had used it to clean and polish the wooden tops of the tables there. I did a quickie workout and got out of there as soon as I could.
