I don’t remember being particularly sensitive to smells when I was younger. But somehow – overnight it seems – my sense of smell became a sense I couldn’t do without. I’ve learned to use it when I cook, instead of taste tests, to see if a dish is just right. I know when cookies are done baking when I can smell the cinnamon and sugar emanating from the oven. I love the smell of rain in the air, but I hate the smell of raw meat and gasoline. I bathe in lavender and lather in coconut. I bury my nose in my husband’s pillow when he is gone on a business trip and I am missing him. I’ve been reduced to tears just catching a whiff of a scent that reminded me of my grandmother.
But there is one smell in particular that I love, that always makes me feel like I just caught the scent of a wonderful secret: the smell of night-blooming jasmine. When I was growing up, there was a jasmine bush just outside my bedroom window. And on summer nights, when my window was open, its perfume would waft in and hover over my bed where I usually lay with a book and a flashlight, reading when I should have been asleep. For me, jasmine was the scent of stolen moments, escape and escapades into the inky black recesses of summer nights. Now, whenever I smell it, I smell night-time in summer.
What scents evoke memories in you?
The Rules
I think there is real power in the human voice, as flawed as it may be. And when the voices speak together, when you have a multitude of voices speaking, patterns begin to emerge and there you can begin to understand truth. So in the spirit of the personal narrative, I am hosting a weekly challenge every Tuesday morning, where I will post a topic (ranging from the banal to the intimate) and ask readers to respond. I would love to see everyone’s answers and how similar and different they all are. (Last week was great! I especially loved reading the comments on my and other people’s blogs in response to the topic!)
You can respond in any way you choose. You can give a fictional response or a true one. You can use words, sentences, and/or photographs. If you have a blog, you can link it with Mr. Linky below. Please be sure to include “Tell It To Me Tuesdays” in the title, and link back to this post. If you don’t have a blog, but want to join in, you can just leave a comment. Please follow the rules. I don’t want to have to delete links. I like links! Don’t make me delete them.
Next week’s challenge: Life for a day
If you could live a different life for a day, what would it be?
Hi Jade,
Great topic this week, I really had to think about it and I’ve been thinking about scents most of the day. I don’t like the smell of gasoline either but my Mum and sister love it! It’s so weird the way scent triggers memory and how people react differently to different smells.
Jade
Thanks! Yeah, I remember I had friends when I was growing up who all loved the smell of gasoline. I always thought they were nuts.
I wonder why scent is so strongly linked to memories? It doesn’t seem like that with other senses. I don’t recall touching things and being forcefully reminded of something else. Particular songs maybe, but not hearing in general. Seeing, yes, but even still, that’s in a very different way.
The amazing thing about the connection between scent and memory is the the powerful impact of surprise. A memory called up by scent is so strong, nonverbal, beyond logic. It seems to speak of a direct connection between the physical and emotional parts of us.
Since you posted I’ve been thinking of many lovely odors that have equally delicious memories attached – Cashmere Bouquet soap and my Gramma; old fashioned iris with their luscious grape scent that takes me all the way back to childhood by way of your husband’s Omama. She had a wonderful bed filled with those flowers beside her front steps. What a lovely way to welcome guests! A box of crayons brings almost all the hope and excitement of a brand new school term; the old smell of newsprint and ink before revised formulas changed them puts me back on my tummy on the floor, ten years old and reading the funnies; the incomparable scent of sheets dried in the sun and wind that my mother was so proud to put on my bed so I could sleep “like a princess”.
Searching for such links has its charm but fails to capture the sudden slam of memory that takes one quite by surprise when a random scent pulls the trigger. Science says that the sense of smell records in a part of the brain that is associated with emotion and that is far down on the primitive end of things. Yes, it does all seem to be on an elemental level. Unexpected and unpredicted, a memory invades our mind and sidetracks whatever process our brains may have been engaged upon just because we detect a few familiar atoms upon the air. We don’t usually operate as many animals do on that level of scent and instinct and when we do, it seems, we are not as divided into head and heart, logic and emotion as we highly evolved humans like to think we are. We become quite powerless to resist as our sense of smell takes over and connects us again across time and distance. Some part of the experience must be that loss of intellectual control for just a moment when our animal nature sends us down the thrill ride of memory. The linked memory makes of us a child or a primitive whose reaction is not diluted by over thinking or civilized resistance.
I watch my dogs delight in the power of the nose. One stands with head lifted high, “reading the newspaper” I call it. What information does she get from a slight breeze that means nothing at all to me? The other tosses the half frozen body of a dead mole with such excitement and rolls on it to take on the scent as if it were perfume.
We humans are far from this dependence on and enjoyment of our sense of smell. But there is still a strong instinctive attachment to the particular scent of one’s own small child or one’s own mother. On some level we are animals after all. So I must pass over the generally accepted smells of flowers and food and recall the malt vinegar scent of my grandfather’s sweat when he came home from a day working on his tractor and the beloved yeasty smell of my mother’s skin on hot summer days even though it embarrassed her profoundly when I mentioned it. These are not the kinds of scents that others would recognize as typically pleasant but they are so full of meaning for me that they must stand in a special place. Not only do they reconnect me to earlier times but also to people now out of my physical reach.