I found an old bottle of cologne last week. I gave it a sniff and I thought about my silly high school days. I should add that giving myself a quick spray did not make me twenty years younger, unfortunately.
The slightly sulfurous smell of burning coal reminds me of visits to my grandma in England when was a little kid in the '70’s; I think one of her neighbors heated their house with it or something.
At my first elementary school the playground had a row of short pieces of telephone pole stuck into the ground so the kids could hop from one to another. Now anytime I walk by a telephone pole on a hot day the smell of the tar they use to seal it brings me back to my first day in kindergarten.
Pull my finger.
Bourbon: can’t remember
There’s a Vietnamese cafe near where I work. It serves killer sua da (iced espresso with canned sweetened milk), so I pop in once in awhile. People can smoke on their terrace outside, so most of the Vietnamese customers take their iced coffee outside and smoke cigarettes while they relax. Now, I hate the smell of cigarette smoke, but when I visit this cafe, I always like to walk through the smoking area. The outdoor cafe atmosphere and the scent of espresso and cigarette smoke takes me straight back to Paris. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to visit there again, but I can have a little flashback this way.
About 15 years ago my sister and I were in a Land’s End store. She walked up to me holding a coat and said, “smell this”. I took a whiff and said, “tent”. The coat was made out of some kind of treated canvas and smelled identical to the tent we shared on camp outs when we were young.
My mom died almost three years ago. I was the one who tried to give her cpr and mouth-to-mouth. She had had red wine prior to dying and even now, the smell of red wine smells like death to me.
Which is a bummer, 'cause I really like red wine.
I have some specific scent memories, and strangely, the strongest of them center on my great-grandmother’s house.
The scent of White Shoulders perfume
Sliced fresh onion
Towels dried in the sun
Certain liquid hand soaps remind me of specific times. A couple weeks ago I used some soap at some friends’ apartment, and it had an identical scent to the bottle I bought for the kitchen when I first moved to the DC area.
My high school still has the same distinctive smell from the cleaning products. It was always very pronounced in the evenings (after cleaning) when I went back in for a basketball game, band practice, etc. I should find out what that stuff was. Mammals are definitely wired to associate smells with locations & events.
I had a flashback to childhood last summer when I got a big bunch of carrots in my organic produce box. (The first thing I learned when I started getting these boxes was that part of un-processed food is that it doesn’t come in neat, clean plastic bags, and the stuff that comes out of the ground still has some of that ground attached to it. I knew this, but had forgotten)
My mom used to keep a fairly large garden when I was a kid. I hadn’t really dealt with “fresh from the ground” produce since then. All I used was what I bought in the store. So I had this beautiful bunch of stem-on carrots of varying sizes, and needed to wash them. As soon as the water hit the carrots in the sink, the smell of dirt and carrot and green stems wafted through my nose and I was 8 years old again, washing carrots for my mom. It still makes me a bit wiffy thinking about it!
I want to play!
- bacon - going out to breakfast with my dad before he drove me to the bus stop when I was in high school. I’d get up extra early and we’d go to our local greasy spoon diner and split a large breakfast plate. I think this was freshman year - halfway through my sophomore year the school added a bus stop a block away from my house so I didn’t have to be driven anymore, and we ate at home from then on.
- popcorn - watching rented movies with my siblings.
- White Shoulders - my grandmother- it’s her perfume. She says the first time she bought White Shoulders for herself, it was from some nervous-looking guy on Broadway in downtown L.A. In retrospect, it was probably recently stolen from one of the stores there, right before Grandma bought it. Either way, he sprayed some on her wrist, and she loved it so much she bought the bottle on the spot for some ridiculously low price, and has worn White Shoulders ever since - bought from legitimate perfume vendors, thankfully.
- gasoline - the Mobil (or was it Arco?) station near the liquor store where we bought Ice Cubes chocolates.
- burning rubber - the industrial town where I lived for a good chunk of my teen years. There was a tire factory near my house, I think. A few years ago, my sisters and I returned for a baby shower for one of their friends, and the moment we pulled into town and the burning rubber smell hit me, I felt at home again.
- Zest soap - the bathroom at that house (apartment really), and its pink tile. We always bought either Zest or Irish Spring, depending on which brand was on sale.
- donuts - the old Winchells donut shops that used to be all over L.A. They went out of business years ago. I liked their chocolate glazed donuts.
- just-mowed grass - the football field at my high school, and trying to get out of P.E.
The smell of a new car will always remind me of my dad. The smell of certain cosmetics, specifically Maybelline mascara, will always remind me of my mom.
Lentil soup (specifically: lentils, potatoes, a bit of chorizo, a dash of red pepper and one leaf of bay laurel) takes me back to the entrance of my maternal grandparents’ house, at age 6 or 7. That particular recipe is very common in Spain, so I’m likely to run into the smell in “home-style cooking” restaurants.
One time it was so strong that I had to grope about for the nearest piece of furniture so that the tactile sensation would corroborate what my eyes were actually seeing and get my brain back to the Here and Now. But it happened to be my mother who was cooking the soup, so it was exactly the same smell.
Pine trees remind me of Christmas. Dial soap reminds me of home. Moth balls and hair spray remind of a former love.
When I was a real little kid, my parents had this cigar box that they kept on top of a high cabinet.* They only brought it out when they threw a big party, and only late at night, after the kids were supposed to be asleep. They’d use the stuff inside to roll cigarettes. I remember thinking it was kind of weird, because my dad smoked all the time, and he didn’t roll his own cigarettes, he just smoked them out of a pack he bought at the store. And my mom didn’t smoke at all. But I was, like, five or six, and pretty much everything my parents did didn’t make much sense. At some point, the box disappeared, and I forgot about it entirely.
Ten years later, I’m in high school, and I attend my first “real” concert. Day on the Green, with Metallica headlining. Soundgarden was one of the opening acts and… I want to say Sublime? No, Google tells me it was Faith No More and Queensryche. Anyway, I’m sitting in the stadium seats, and this guy in front of me takes a joint out of his pocket and lights it up. The smell hits me, and all of a sudden, I flash back onto that cigar box. And I realize that my parents weren’t smoking tobacco, at the tail-end of those long ago parties.
Ten years after that, I’m helping my dad clear out the attic, and in the bottom of a cardboard box - there’s that old cigar box. Still had all their old paraphenalia in it, too. My dad gave the stuff to me to do what I wanted with it. Most of it, I threw out, including the disintegrating box, but I kept a few items. They’re practically heirlooms, at this point.
[sub]*I never really thought of this before, but that cabinet was probably only about six feet high, tops. In my memory, it’s always been about twenty feet tall.[/sub]
There’s one of those combination smells that young children (pre-pubescent for sure and maybe still younger) acquire after some hard exercise or horseplay. It’s a sweaty aroma but not of the same sharpness that older kids and adults get. Musty, maybe. Mix that with the smells of grass stains and dirt and little kids’ clothing and it’s a distinctive combo.
Whenever I get a whiff of that off one of my grandchildren (or somebody else’s youngish kids) it makes me think of a little girl who was the younger sister of my best friend in grammar school. She would have been maybe 5 when I was maybe 7 or 8. Why her I have no real way to explain but that’s what happens.
It will take having other smells hit my nostrils before other assocaitions with specific people come to mind. I’m pretty sure there are others, but that one I described is the only one I can conjure up from just the description of it. That makes me think my stronger sense memories are from that age or nearby.
My grandparents’ basement had a certain smell to it that I’ve never smelled anywhere else. It was a fully finished basement with linoleum flooring, full bar and opened to the outside in the back. It was like… pine trees, wood finishes. Maybe some kind of booze along with it. The garage opened to it as well and it had a full woodshop in it. I can remember the smell but there’s no way I could replicate it. I wonder if my mom knew what caused it.
Olfactory stimuli are very powerful. The ability to smell is connected to the brains limbic system which involves memory and emotion. We encounter new smells early in our lives and that experience becomes hardwired in the brain. The whole caboodle - where we were and how we felt at that moment.
Emotion seems to be the over-riding command for creating the memory, so a known smell can still imprint an image if it is encountered at a powerful moment.
Great points. There are some smells that are similar to others that are still unique and may even call up scenes or isolated pictures and sounds where their similar aromas may not.
One such smell for me is of the paper caps used in toy guns. They are more evocative than firecrackers and gunpowder used in live rounds. I don’t usually think of specific times and places for them, but I do associate the smell with games we’d play where cap guns were involved.