I hadn’t thought of this in years. In high school, the popular scent for girls was Bonne Bell’s Skin Musk. Everyone wore it. I had a little bottle of it on my dresser for years and years, keeping it around even after they stopped making it. Every now and then I’d open it and take a whiff, and I’d go right back to 1974.
Right, I mentioned this before as well.
Two scents come to mind, both of which trace back to when I was around 10 years old. At that time, my family moved from suburban Chicago, to Green Bay, where my parents (and my aunt and uncle) had bought a True Value hardware store.
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There’s a sulfurous smell, sort of reminiscent of sausages, which was commonly in the air in Green Bay at that time, due to the paper mills. That smell occurs far less often up there these days (better environmental controls, I’m guessing), but on the occasion that I encounter that sort of smell now, it takes me back to riding around Green Bay as a kid.
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The smell of incompletely-combusted gasoline, especially if there’s a little motor oil in the exhaust, summons memories of the repair shop in our hardware store, where we repaired small-engine tools like lawnmowers and snowblowers.