One day around 1984 I was standing in my kitchen in San Antonio and sliced a lime in half. I held it to my nose and I was instantly transported in time and space to 1952 when I was around four and we lived in West Palm Beach, Florida. We lived in a poor, then-undeveloped area that was covered by citrus groves.
In the neighborhood where I lived before I moved to The Home, one of the neighbors had planted a row of diminutive orange trees in their front yard. I looked forward to when they were all in bloom, and on my walk I’d just stop and stick my face amongst them and breathe in the evocative fragrance. Watching out for bees, of course. Then when we had the big snow/freeze in 2020, all of the trees froze and died. So sad.
Many of my big road trips started off driving past stockyards in rural California, so I began to associate the smell of thousands of cattle with going on vacation.
The road to Sequoia National Park the road passes through Lemon Cove and when the orchards are in bloom the smell is heavenly.
In the west the smell of sage and creosote after a rain is one of my favorite smells.
My paternal Grandmother was born in Germany, not terribly far from Cologne. Her favorite cologne was 4711. She loved it so much that when she caught wind that I’d be shooting a job in Germany back in 1985, she begged me to bring the largest bottle I could back. Duty-Free was my friend and Nani had that ginormous bottle until she died around 2000.
That scent? I could be in a small room or walking through Grand Central Terminal. I catch 4711 in the air, I’m sitting in Nani’s apartment visiting.
Indeed, as pointed out, scent is the oldest and most powerful sense-memory trigger.
My dad worked for the Post Office (as it was then). Many times we’d visit his station and go in the back. All P.O. back areas smell exactly the same. I could be dropped into one blindfolded and I’d know the smell. Leather. Dust. Paper.
Oh, yes. And the smell of the desert in the mornings. I absolutely adore that smell.
Actually, they’re not really. They do have solanine, which is kinda toxic, but you’d need to eat a lot if leaves to even get a stomach upset. It’s presumably been exaggerated as there’s other plants which are fairly closely related which are highly toxic, but there’s recipes out there using tomato leaves.
Like this one, from a pretty large UK foodie company.
Similarly, my dad was/is a rock cutter for all the the days of my life. The smell of turpentine immediately puts me back on his lap in his first tiny shop while he cut opals on one of his machines. (The turpentine isn’t used for this sort of cutting, but the rock-cutting activities are all mixed up in my memories.)
I know that exact smell from that exact place, where I spent many happy hours not surfing. Thanks for making me smile to remember it!
Comet cleaner, an abrasive bleach blend, smells like Saturday morning chores scrubbing the bathtub at my childhood home.
Bus exhaust - riding the bus home from the beach, we get dropped off and the fumes about knock our sunburned butts over.. hot, thirsty, lobster red and lightheaded from fume. Good times. 25 cents to ride, 1.25 for a slice from Florio’s and .50 for an Italian ice. Watched paddleball at Garfield street before catching the bus on A1A. Woe to those who spent all their nickels and dimes and had nothing left for bus fare.
That scent takes me back to the Lionel trains I had as a kid in the '70s, for certain.
Another one which is instantly evocative for me is hot, fresh caramel corn. It immediately takes me back to the Port Plaza Mall in downtown Green Bay, circa 1978, where there was a Karmelkorn shop in the mall’s central plaza, next to the video arcade.
The smell I always think of is one I can’t find anywhere.
It was in my first week at university, when I was 18, and I went to one of those fairs where they try sell you posters for your room and assorted decor and tat. Someone was selling incense and simila, including this stuff which was labelled as ‘ground amber’. It smelled amazing. I bought some, and lost it a year or so later.
I have no idea what it was, I’ve sniffed my way through many a hippy shop in the decades since, but while there is a huge diversity in the smell of things labelled as ‘amber’, none of them smelled even slightly like the stuff I bought back then.
However, I did buy a freezer two years back from someone whose house smelled almost exactly like it, but they were in a mad rush and in the middle of moving out, so I didn’t ask them what it was. Right back to age 18 and my first week of moving out and going to bed whenever I wanted…
If someone asks me to think about how something smells, or I try to conjure up a memory of how something specific smelled, it’s not a powerful compelling memory, although I can do it.
But when I encounter a smell, it brings back memories if it’s got prior associations for me, and in that mode it’s very powerful.
When I toured a submarine 20+ years after leaving the service, as soon as I started climbing down the ladder, I was struck by the smell: a mix of amine (used to scrub carbon dioxide from the air while submerged), hydraulic fluid, diesel, and grease. Anyway, it was powerfully evocative and immediately brought back an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.
And when I was actually serving aboard my submarine, I had a shirt that my then girlfriend (later wife) had worn with hints of her perfume. It reminded me of her during months of deployment while underway at sea.
I grew up in a small sawmill town until I was 5 yrs old. Creosote oil was a tar used to paint the docks and river pilings. Whenever I smell creosote I am 3 or 4 years old again.
Every time I walk into an old, empty laboratory or warehouse, it has the same distinct musty, dusty, “Federal” smell to it, but not in a bad way . . . it’s a nostalgic smell that tells me “this place has a deep history.”
I do visit a lot of old, somewhat-still-in-use Cold War sites, so this smell keeps coming back to me often.
Many years ago, I was looking for a room deodorizer, and when I sniffed one that matched my grandmother’s backyard, into my cart it went! I don’t even remember what any of those smells were, just that it smelled like Grandma’s backyard.
Loss of smell memory is considered an early sign of mental decline.
I’ve had no sense of smell for most of my life, cause unknown. The only scent memory I have is of my paternal grandmother’s house, where I visited only once or twice. I liked it. My mom tells me that was the smell of booze and cigarettes.
I thought of another one. At least 40, or maybe even 50 years ago, I dated a guy who wore this Yves St. Laurent men’s cologne:
It had a refreshing lemony scent. I loved it. The guy and I broke up eventually, but the next guy I dated-- well, I bought him that cologne for Christmas one year. So sue me. We broke up, too, and life went on.
Around 2000, when Mrs. Meyer’s products came out, I bought her Clean Day Hand Soap in the Lemon Verbena scent:
After I washed my hands with it for the first time, I put my hands up to my face and inhaled. Yikes! It was the same scent–identical–and that propelled me back in an olfactory flash to one or the other of those guys–after so long they kind of blur together. But good memories. Mostly.