I am at work tonight, and I went outside to get some fresh air and I noticed a smell in the air. The gardner had just mowed the grass and you could smell Spring in the air. The deep, earthy, rich smell that reminds you of when you were a kid and how you used to dig up holes in the backyard (I guess maybe only guys would know what I am talking about). And you could also smell the crisp green scent from the freshly cut grass. It was like I was ten and still playing soccer (or football for you Euros) and I had just slide tackled the forward with the ball and was covered with grass stains that I could still smell on the ride home.
Later I went outside and the sprinklers were on and I could smell the water in the air. I don’t know how to describe this one, it was like I was at the beach on an overcast day and the wind is blowing hard, I have my girlfriend in my arms and the spray from the ocean is blowing on us and I can smell the life in the water. I could almost hear the seagulls in the air and hear the foghorn.
Another smell that still brings back memories is whenever it rains. I have two dogs, Bouvier des Flandes, and if you know the breed then you know that these dogs are big, black, hairy bears. They always have a stupid grin on their face and their little bobbed tails are ALWAYS in motion. Well yesterday it rained and I was too slow in getting the little buggers in the house and they were SOAKED! The smell of them reminded me of the first day that we got them, it rained that day also and they were outside playing and when I opened the door to let them in the little guys (well gals actually) bowled me over and started licking my face and hopping around and barking. It was one of the cutest things that I can remember. Now they are too big to be cute and they fart a lot so I guess the honeymoon is over. 
And the one smell I will never forget is the smell of my soon-to-be-girlfriend the first time that we kissed. But that one is my own little memory…
So what smells remind you guys of something? It does not need to be anything deep or personal. Just something that when you smell it, it reminds you of another time or another place. I keep seeing people bitch about how this message board is going to shit with stupid threads, so I thought I would try my part to add something that will hopefully be a little funny and little bit more interesting to read.
Also, I suck at writing subject lines so I don’t think this thread will be around very long at all. But I guess we’ll see…
-N
Ex-boyfriend’s cologne. I don’t know what it is, but is makes me run in the opposite direction every time.
As for GOOD memories? Lilacs. I remember being a very small Riddle and hiding myself from the bus in the middle of a Lilac bush that was in full bloom. Don’t worry, the bus made a big loop every morning.
For what it’s worth, IIRC, your memory receptors are located right in back of your olfactory glands in your brain, so smell memories are processed and retrieved faster than any other sensory memories. Or something.
Black hair dye. It’s not easy for me to explain, but I’ll try. The period of roughly eight or nine months following my eighteenth birthday was probably the best time of my life. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was that makes it stand out in my memories this way, but it seemed as if nothing could go wrong during that time. This was also the time that I started dyeing my hair. So now, every time my hair has been freshly colored, and a strand or two brushes past my nose, I think back to that time, and how great I felt.
Mixture of senses here, but the smell of deep summer in the midwest, i.e. green-growth smell, fecudity, eau de life; mixed with driving my old, much-loved beater car through summer nights coming home from my seasonal job.
It was a great time of life. The job was a pit, but the people were great. I had all the energy in the world, fuelled by good company and serendipity. On those 2 a.m. drives I’d see owls w/ 4 ft. wingspans glide out of the night, deer, and somehow I always remember a full moon.
It was a great time. Fortunately, all those scents, sights and sounds can bring it back. Sigh. If that ain’t grace, it’s close enough for me.
Veb
Curry powder and stinky underarms = the East Side IRT.
Diesel fuel, and rotten fish… What great summers I had by the shore. Thanks dad…
The perfume Happy. My first kiss was with a girl who was wearing Happy. So now, whenever I catch a sniff of Happy, I can recall the euphoric suspended time feeling I had during the kiss. This is unfortunate because one of the admins here at work wears the perfume and whenever she swings by to ask a question I get distracted by the memory and have no idea what she’s asking.
Another is rain. I grew up in northern Nevada and the rain there has a very unique smell. There is an electric tinge to it and the whole earth smells clean. I have lived in Hawaii, Utah, and Texas and they don’t have the same smell. Once, only once, did the rain in Hawaii have a slight whiff of Nevada to it and I just had this feeling of comfort. Like I was home. Then the smell was gone, I got homesick, and called my mom.
Baseball mitts. Playing in Little League were my happiest childhood moments. The smells of mitts always give me a momentary sensation of youthful optimism and simple joy.
Pert Plus shampoo reminds me of an ex-love.
Diesel fuel and burning coal remind me of being in England at wintertime.
Nina Ricci perfume reminds me of my mom and dad going out for the evening when I was little.
Orangeblossom! Reminds me of sping training baseall, first love, and everything else that is good in life!
This reminds me of Proust. 
I was born in Akron, Ohio and lived there until age 8. To this day, the smell of burning rubber reminds me of home…
Strider… I know that grass smell exactly… It reminds me of summer though… long evenings of sitting in the park, talking and relaxing…
oohhh, and Diesel brings me back too… dont know why…
For me I love the smell of rain. It reminds me of camping with my Dad and our friends and we would sit under a tarp we had set up over the picnic table talking and playing cards sometimes. It also just reminds me of being calm and at peace, relaxing during the summer.
Fire smoke… same as above as well as reminding me of summer camp every night we would have a campfire and the last night we would have a huge bonfire. Some of the best times I’ve ever had.
The smell of sand. You know that salty smell usually how your bag smells after dragging it to the beach and getting sand in it. Sometimes I don’t know why but I can smell it here (and we live nowhere near the ocean) and it just tosses me back to my Grandparent’s cottage.
Oscar de la Renta… one lady my Dad was friends with she wore this perfume all the time and she was really nice to me because she had no daughters. (Two boys who she loved to bits but she always wanted a daughter) and it reminds me of just sitting and talking with her.
Honeysuckle and gardenia always make me think of the nights my brothers and I spent outside running around catching fireflys when we were kids.
Diesel is good. The first car I can remember my parents having was a Diesel VW Rabbit. I think I was no older than 7. But the smell still delights me.
Smell triggers memories…yes, my story is this-my brother inherited a china cabinet from my late grandmother. One day I was at his house, and opened it-I instantly was transported back to her house,the odor is a mixture of tea, old flowers, stale tobacco, and god knows what else. But it was the same smell I smelled when I was 5 years old!
During high school, I was in one of the best marching bands in Texas, and late October, early November was contest season. We would load up early morning when it was wet and cold, and the buses would be idling while we ran back and forth, getting uniforms, instruments, bags, coolers, and backpacks.
When I walk by a city bus and smell the exhaust, I have this feeling of comraderie and adventure that has never been equalled in my adult life.
Old Spice aftershave
My dad wore it for special occasions when I was just a sprout. I can still remember hugging him around the neck and smelling it.
Rain, vanilla candles, and Mr. Clean
Maybe once or twice a year during the spring and fall, my mom would “open up the house” when the weather was nice (cool and usually a bit rainy), light some of her candles, and we’d clean the place from top to bottom. Much as I hated chores, I didn’t mind this so much, because it smelled so good. To this day, I refuse to buy any cleaner other than Mr. Clean.
Sometimes, when it’s been stinking hot and humid for a few days, and then the rain comes, immediately after that, if I step outside, for all the world, it smells just like Bali.
On a similar note, I used to buy my SO clove cigarettes at Christmas every year, though they are dreadfully unhealthy for you (70+ mg tar!), because they were like a little journey to Bali without the airfare, everytime he lit one up. Better than insence. Since I never knew when he would light up, often I was in another room, the aroma would just come upon me. No matter what I was doing, how focused I was, in an instant I was transported.
I was thinking about smells this morning on my commute to work.
My mom handed me my dad’s drycleaning to drop off at the cleaners. He wears some kind of cologne that mingles with the pipe tobacco he smokes. The result is a pleasingly strange smell. It smells exactly like the inside of my violin case. Slightly acrid, like a breath of distant creosote, but slightly sweet and woody, like cedar - and green, like freshly rained-on pine.
The violin was previously owned by my great-grandfather. I remember the first time I opened the case. I was nine years old. The smell enveloped me. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, wondering if that was the same air that my great-grandfather once breathed. Maybe it was his scent that permeated the violin and case.
I know now that it was just the combination of the wood in the case and some old deteriorating tape that held the case together mingled with the rosin. Still, I felt very close to the great-grandfather I had never met, with each breath of the air in the violin case.
-Nostalgic h_thur
The smell of cheap wax always makes me think of Halloween when I was little.
The smell of rain takes me back to when we’d first open up the cabin. The weather was always horrible, but man, would we be excited.
There are a few scents that I don’t know, which take me back to when I was little. Those and the ones that smell like France, are the best.