Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Smells bring out the back-stories

This week I’m building my posts around the five senses. Monday I used the sense of touch. Yesterday I used the sense of taste in my post about cooking. Today, I consider the sense of smell.

I walk up the sidewalk to the porch of the red brick building. It’s hot, in the 90s, and muggy. The humidity seems to bring out the odors around me, and I smell the boxwood near the porch.
The smell of boxwood outside my doctor’s office on a summer day takes me back.

Do smells ever evoke memories in you? Research shows that they can.
An example of this for me is the scent of that boxwood.
http://www.aragriculture.org/horticulture/ornamentals/plant_database/shrubs/littleleaf_boxwood.htm
We had boxwood at my first home, where I lived until I was 10. One was a huge, thick one at the corner of our front yard.
In that front yard is where I often played cars with my second brother, who was two years older than me.
He had lots of Hot Wheels. I didn’t have any of my own, but he loaned me his lesser cars so we could play together.
Between two oak trees, where grass wouldn’t grow (or maybe didn’t grow because we played there so often), we built roads in the dust for our cars. We each claimed a tree.
I had my house up in the roots of one of the trees. I created long meandering driveways to the house. I scratched lines in the dust with a small stick, and then looked for seeds to place along the lines for a garden.
There were some soft green seeds we found in the yard, and those were my watermelons.
I was the only girl in my family. My brothers wouldn’t play dolls or house with me, but I could play cars or sports with them.
I found a way while playing with cars to also play house.
When we moved, we took some of the boxwood with us. My parents planted them in front of the house, around the carport, the front porch and the flowers on either side.
It was my job to water them every night until their roots were set. That meant filling up a gallon bucket from the water hose and pouring it on each bush.
It was boring work that took a while, so to make things more fun, I named each of the shrubs. I named them in alphabetical order, so the first one was named with an A name, the second with a B name, and so on.
I don’t remember the names now, but I remember that they were all girl names. And since I loved making up names for my future children, and often used the names of characters from books I enjoyed, the names were probably something like Amelia, Betsy, Catherine, Daisy, Emily, etc.
I never had children to receive those names, but I had fun making up the names and weaving stories around them.
Those are pleasant memories. Of course, smells can evoke unpleasant memories, too. There is a certain perfume that, when I smell it, takes me right back to my first year in college, when I started my real struggle with depression. Those feelings of isolation momentarily surround me again.

What smells evoke memories in you?

18 comments:

  1. What a beautiful post!! Those sound like lovely memories.

    I am an only child, but when I was a kid my babysitter had a little boy that was a few years younger than me and I used to play cars with him all the time. Your post totally just brought me back to that!

    I love the smell of food. My mom is a good cook and the house often had the wonderful aroma of something good in the oven.

    I actually don't have too many "scent" memories. I've always had nasal problems, and believe it or not, but my sense of smell can go in and out. Sometimes people will say something like, "Oh wow, can you smell that?" and I'm like, "Smell what?" ha ha

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    1. Thank you, Sunny, for your kind comment!

      My mother was a good cook, too, when she was still cooking, and it always smelled good around mealtime.

      My husband has the same problem with his sense of smell--nasal problems get in the way sometimes.

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  2. Smells are definitely evocative for me. Some can take my mind back to very happy times while others try to summon me back to not so good times.

    I too used to name my future children using characters from my favorite books.

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    1. Elizabeth, sounds like books helped us to dream of the future!

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  3. Oh goodness, smells do SO much to bring back memories for me! A certain brand of sunscreen, for example, takes me back to my first tennis lessons when I was four. Don't remember anything I learned, but I remember the smell!

    Hmmm, now I'm left trying to guess which books those characters are from. :) Let's see - Betsy . . . the Betsy/Tacy books? Emily . . . Emily of New Moon? Don't have an idea about the other ones - probably wasn't the Daisy of Henry James or Fitzgerald at that age!

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    1. Yes, Betsy came from the Betsy/Tacy books--I loved them and read them over and over. Emily from a book called Jane-Emily, kind of a mystery/supernatural story. And Daisy from Little Women (Meg's daughter).

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    2. I thought I was the only person ever who had read Jane-Emily! Loved it during the day, terrified of it during the night.:)

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  4. Bean Soup..the smell of it takes me back to my grandmothers house. She lived a couple houses down from us so I went there a lot, loved her to pieces and one of my favorite things she would make was bean soup. I think it's funny a kid would ask for that, but to this day it is a very comforting smell to me. I make it with a ham shank in my crockpot and it smells the whole house up. Love it.

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    1. Hmmmm, that would smell delicious. I'm glad it's a comforting smell for you. Your grandmother must have been very special to you.

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    2. I think I remember reading once (but don't quote me :) ) that the sense of smell evokes more memories than any other sense. That is definitely true for me.......the smell of pine brings me back to childhoods spent in NH, the smell of fresh-cut grass, lilacs, and other "natural" smells all bring back specific memories. Ah, and the smell of a certain after-shave will bring tears to my eyes as it reminds me of my Dad, who passed away three years ago. I can't think of any negative smell associations that I have, but I bet they're "in there" somewhere.

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    3. Janet, I think you're right about the sense of smell being the most evocative of memories. I think it's interesting, because you'd think it would be the sense of sight or hearing.

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  5. It is a beautiful post. Smells can be so poignant sometimes.

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  6. I love that you named each shrub. What a creative child you were!

    I have several smells that evoke strong memories. But since you brought up perfume, I'll say my freshman roommate wore Tresor, and she always sprayed it before she left for class. And I despised the scent of it (I never said anything about it though). Luckily, not many people wear it anymore, but if I catch a whiff, I feel instant irritation.

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  7. The smell of freshly made snickerdoodles, with all that cinnamon, takes me back when my father would bake cookies. He made pies and other things, but it's the snickerdoodles I remember most.

    Lilacs outside my bedroom window in one of the homes we lived in. I used to play under those bushes with my dolls, putting the little Kiddles on the leaves and making up stories. I now have two lilac bushes near my kitchen and breakfast area, so when they're in bloom I open the windows and let the scent in. I also cut lilacs and put them in vases inside.

    Grandma's Dove soap in her bathroom. I loved visiting her, and I loved the smell of her bathroom.

    So many more, I'm sure, but those are a few!

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  8. Love this story of you naming the shrubs and tricking your brother into playing house! Good memories evoked by smell. A few months ago I opened a box of china my grandmother left me - my parents had packed it up almost twenty years ago, and I never had a place to put it until now. When I opened the box, the scent of my grandmother's house, long since sold, brought me to tears.

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    1. Oh, I'm sorry it made you cry, but how wonderful that you have good memories of your grandmother. Isn't it amazing that the smells lingered for that long.

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  9. My memory of smells is not so good. I started having migraines at the age of 8 and when I have them everything smells much stronger and makes me nauseous. Especially sweet smells like perfume. They can trigger a migraine attack as well.

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    1. I'm sorry you have migraines. I used to have them, but haven't for a while. The light usually bothers me more than smells.

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