Smellories? Smemories? Ugh, definitely no to that last one.
The sense of smell is one of our oldest senses, and deeply tied to our instinctual, lizard brains. Therefore smells from one’s past can trigger powerful feelings and memories. In college, maybe a year after a girlfriend I was crazy about broke up with me, a girl sitting next to me in a class had on the same perfume she used to wear, and I could not concentrate on one word the professor was saying. I was completely lost in memories of my old girlfriend.
I got to thinking about this subject recently after my wife bought some sort of fancy, olive-based, soap-free, PH-neutral body wash for sensitive skin. I tried using some of it and I noticed it had a subtle but very interesting fragrance that had a powerful effect on me for some reason. I kept rubbing a little of it on my hands and smelling it, trying to place where I’d smelled it before.
It finally occurred to me-- when I was a kid, I got really into coin collecting. My dad had this piggy bank that was a cedar barrel sideways on a stand, with a coin slot on top and a cork plug on the side. It was full of coins, mostly pennies (but I also found an awesome Indian Head nickel) that he let me look through. I spent hours checking years and mint marks on the pennies, looking for a rare and valuable one. Never found it, but I had fun looking. The fancy body wash was very similar to that combined smell of cedar and old pennies.
My maternal grandmother, I always associate with the smell of apple cider vinegar, which she used for anything that called for vinegar (including some of my favorite dishes). I’ve been known to occasionally open my bottle and sniff, just for the sake of nostalgia.
I always associate the smell of tomato plants (the plants themselves, not the fruits) with my mother, an avid gardener. It’s a shame the plants are toxic; they smell wonderful.
And my paternal grandfather died when I was very young, so I remember almost nothing about him… except for the smell of hot wiring, from the electric train setup (and other electronics projects) he had in his basement.
McCormick spices evoke the days when their facility was in Baltimore in what is now the fancy-pants Inner Harbor area…
There’s another smell - don’t know what it is but I recognize it instantly - that takes me back to the late 50s/early 60s when my folks were house-hunting, thinking the paternal grandparents needed to live with us. Whatever the sellers had been cooking is locked in my brain with that time. (We never did buy another place - my grandfather died shortly thereafter and my grandmother got an apartment near where we lived.)
Every year around the holidays, I remember my mother getting up early-early-early to put the turkey in the oven. Those birds used to take forever to cook!
But before the bird even came near the heat, she had to prepare her famous dressing. And that meant she had to chop acres and acres of onions and celery.
So much that her hands smelled like onions and celery for most of the day.
For me, the smell of onions and celery together trigger powerful memories of Momma, love, warmth, family. I have to stop whatever I’m doing and re-live that special time.
I haven’t had a sense of smell for most of my life, but I did when I was very young. I once realized that I had a smell memory of my paternal grandmother’s house, where I only went once or twice. When I asked my mom what that smell was, she said, “Booze and cigarettes.”
My grandma’s house had a very distinctive smell that even when she still lived there I had strong affinity for. I never was able to figure out what caused it though. They had a cedar closet, so probably that. But also likely some combination of soaps etc.
My parent’s house didn’t have a basement though, and hers did (with a wonderland of Pool, Ping Pong, Air Hockey, Darts, and Pinball). So to me basements smell like Grandma’s house.
I vaguely remember reading that vanilla is put into perfume because it smells like “mother’s milk”, and it trigger’s an unconscious effect on the smeller.
A lot of Grandma memories, unsurprisingly. My own Grandma memory is of my maternal Scottish Grandma making the traditional English Sunday Dinner for Christmas. Roast beef, roast potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding. Swedes (mashed Rutabaga) or cauliflower with white sauce for the veggie. She’d make it on random Sundays as well, but I remember most going over there and the smells of dinner cooking on Christmas Day.
Nowadays my sister and I take turns cooking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Christmas dinner, and the smell always reminds me of Grandma’s house.
My maternal grandparents’ house smelled like breakfast; eggs, sausage, coffee. It was a small house (and still is in the family), so it kept the smell most of the time.
My early childhood was in a company lumber mill town on the Columbia River in Oregon. The company owned and built the houses for the workers, wooden sidewalks, a company store as in “I owe my soul to the company store.” The ships used to come right up to the dock to load lumber. The smell of the docks, the railroad ties, the sidewalks, they all were creosote.
And the smell of creosote, the tar that they used to use on the wooden pilings, planks on the docks, etc to preserve the wood, always brings me back to that place that does not exist anymore. Creosote was a wood tar product that was used but no longer is, because of carcinogenic reasons. But it was widely used in the past and whenever I am walking on a dock somewhere on a hot day, the smell of creosote takes me back 60 years. No other smell does that.
When I was a kid, we had a lot of older relatives. Every single one of their homes had a distinctive smell, and it hit you as soon as you opened the door. I think it was from cooking with grease, but may have included Ben Gay.
Also, when I was seven I had my tonsils out. They used ether to put me under. It was the only time in my life I ever smelled ether, but now, 68 years later, I still remember that odor.
Smell of railway tracks.
A sharp tangy rusty kind of smell.
My grandma’s house was a stone’s throw away from the tracks.
We played on them all the time.
Now when I walk my dogs near the tracks by the dog park, the smell hits me and I go back 45 years and think about the little boy who places coins on the tracks just before the steam train thundered past and then faithfully plants the flattened razor thin coins in the hope of them growing to money trees.
My maternal grandparents were dairy farmers, so whenever I drive past a farm and get a whiff of cow manure it makes me think of their farm.
Also, their house was a late 19th century farmhouse with an antique wood burning stove in the kitchen, which grandma still cooked on even though they also had a modern electric stove. So their kitchen always had a lingering smell of wood smoke. Actually more like a combination of wood smoke and sausage.
I concur about the powerful ability of smells to evoke memories. It’s not something you can easily make a list of, but more the kind of thing that hits you very powerfully when you smell it.
One thing I can think of is the smell of fir and pine trees. Naturally the smell of a Christmas tree when it first comes in the house evokes strong memories of childhood Christmases. But also, the smell of lots of fir and pine trees outdoors, especially in the rain, brings back distinct memories of our summer cottage. It was in an area where evergreens were abundant, plus my dad planted a lot of them on the property.
And the other day I popped some frozen sausage rolls in the oven and the kitchen gradually filled with what was to me a “Christmas morning” smell. I don’t even know the nature of the association, and whether it’s a very old Christmas-morning memory or a relatively recent one, but there’s something about the smell of baking pastry that does it.
I’m sure that we all have a vast repertoire of “smell memories” that we mostly don’t consciously remember, but that would be triggered by the right smell.
It used to be common to roast turkeys in brown paper bags. This created a house filled with turkey smoke that was unlike any other aroma. I really miss this particular Thanksgiving memory.
There’s an especially particular smell in Bangkok I’ve mentioned before. I call it “Bangkok whorehouse.” Sort of a musty smell in some of the older buildings. The cinema at the Alliance Francaise on Sathon Road is a good example, and many of the older government buildings have it. I stayed in a hotel in Beijing once that smelled just like it, and it felt like Bangkok. I don’t know what it is that causes it.
The smell of autoclaves - I guess it’s actually the smell of burned agar - is unmistakable. The merest whiff takes me back to the labs and the sterile area.
