Pour water on that memory

"Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth." Diane Ackerman

Not long ago, my mom shared an experience she had when she was cleaning out my grandmother's basement. She came across a bag of glass baby bottles and supplies. Upon opening it, a scent came tumbling out that instantly reawakened memories long ago forgotten. The combination of scents mashed together to send her flying into a foggy bank of memories she had long since lost.

It got me to thinking about all the scents, unique to a time and place, many of which I cannot even name, that still hold power over me when I come across them again.

A unique mash of smells harness themselves to my other senses and bring to mind a time, a moment, a period in my life that usually lies dormant.

Recently, I went into a Sunday school room in a church that I had not been in since I was my daughter's age and the mound of crayons and books rubbed against my senses releasing a torrent of watery memory over husks of moments that had been dehydrated for a long time.

I have done a lot of travelling in the fall. Falls in my teens and twenties were periods of travel for me . Now each and every fall when the cooling air hits the smoke coming out of the chimneys and mingles with car exhaust, I start to return to a back stoop of a hostel in Paris eating bread and cheese or a campfire next to the Danube. The scent fills me with a longing.

So many of these evocative smells do not have a name and they are just out of reach. When I go to grab for them they dissipate. Here are a few of my favourites.

New Dehli
fruit and wood smoke and car exhaust

My first baby
breast milk and her mixed together (haven't smelled it since, well, almost once, but then it filtered away)

Red and White store in Eureka
creosote and..., and...something that I only smell in convenience stores.

Bridges Street
concrete basement smell, moth balls and sweet soap

Grade primary
rotting leaves and crayons and pencil cases (they still smell like that)

How about you?

Comments

A 5 minute challenge

WifeMotherExpletive extended an invitation I could not refuse: " Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking" on the word, Real . real is what I always strive to be. in a hurry to be as real as possible, I've overlooked so much. I have denied myself things that would have helped me understand things better. real, but real for who? as I age, I want to be more real to me because I suspect that there will be many surprises. hard to believe that I will be surprised since I have lived with myself for 36 , going on 37 years, but I don't doubt it for one minute. Honesty is where I falter. I can achieve "real" (does it qualify as real if it is in quotation marks) but it may not be true. In general, I want things to be tied up in a package and smooth even it is too jagged to fit. I want this, I know that to be real, it cannot happen but I think true is what I need to really aim for. I know some things are tru...

the words fell out

Despite being an introvert, I do often process big life events (and many many small ones) out loud by verbally hashing out my thoughts with whoever will put up with me. But this morning when I woke up to the big red blotch on the U.S. map...all my /the words fell out. They fell out unsaid, unformed. Got to work and probably , in another time, would have annoyed my co-workers, dominating the conversation with my verbal extrusions, but not today. I just mutely stared across at them and nodded. My dad came for lunch. Normally, we relish a good political diatribe, especially when we feel sure of our perspective, but this time, all I could do was munch on fries and marvel at all the unarticulated thoughts that I was not even bothering to retrieve. The silence inside me was noticeable. Social media was awash with reactions and I just looked away. I couldn't bear to read one word about it. I was not receptive to any reactions, accusations, reflections, words...

Bringing her back

As the first anniversary finally passed, I exhaled. The sadness still nibbled away at the edges, but not clawing deep into my chest like it had been with varying degrees of ferocity in the twelve months previously. She died in early summer, so I plunged into ocean and lakes and ate fruit straight from the plant. The grief became softer, the folk songs carried me along in the potato patch we planted in therapy. But then, I started to miss her. The deep grief kept her so close and now as the pressure eased, so did her presence. I held my breath and decided to be really sad this morning just to see her face. To sit in her prescence. My breath became jagged as I cried for her, for us. This Taylor Swift cover by Marc Maron broke me right open this morning. Here's to staying broken open enough to keep your loved ones close. And then, I walked into her garden. The garden she envisionied, planted over and over and still pre...

Growing Versions

Search This Blog