When I was 11,12,13 years I was a paperboy in an old-line industrial city in Ohio - what we call the "rustbelt" these days. I had a fairly large route that took me into an older part of town. Mostly I just delivered the paper, but every week I had to beat on the door and "collect." All kinds of people behind those doors .... all kinds of smells. ( I've always had a keen sense of smell.) Every house was different - the smell of urine in the house of the family with several toddlers, that migrated from the south; the acrid smell of the two elderly lesbians who had driven off all the other paperboys; the smells of coffee or home cooking in many homes; the glorious smell of whiskey in the homes of the drinkers.
One thing about the sense of smell: it is a thing in itself. It takes some mental gymnastics to construct a narrative from a fragrance or from a reek.
4
Walking to coffee with a friend, we strolled by a bowling alley with the door open to the sidewalk. As the mixed smells of cigarettes, spilled beer, and yes, probably some vomit eminated from the thick shag carpeting, she took a deep luxurious breath and lett out a long satisfied "Ahhhhhh...". Amazed I asked for an explanation . She said that she grew up on a farm and the whole family would go into town on Saturday night for bowling and pizza and this smelled like those happy childhood memories.
11
As a born and bred New Yorker, I also remember the wonderful aromas of roasted chestnuts (as well as toasted potatoes) wafting across our streets. At home, I recall the smells of my dad's Chesterfields and my mother's cooking and baking - especially her apple pies, challas and cinnamon cookies, roast chicken and fried burgers. I wonder what smells my own children will remember other than those of their father's ciggies.
Yes, our senses are the gateway to memories long past....while working in the city and aching for home, the smell of fresh mulch or the bloom of Central Park would pull at my heartstrings and I could close my eyes and feel the fresh air rolling across the freshly plowed fields awaiting the seeds of Spring. Now raising a family in the rural outskirts of the city, my mind sometimes wanders thinking of the excitement that the city brought. Occasionally, melancholy wins out I long for the sounds of honking horns, the bright city lights and the smell of chestnuts cooking on a shopping cart on the streets of Broadway.
3
Thank you for talking about cigarettes. For years, my dad's office smelled like stale cigarettes (my mother dutifully flushed the ones at home before they went to bed). Later, when I worked for a small business where the owner smoked, I was thrilled to open up in the mornings because of that same stale smell.
My parents eventually quit, and I thoroughly dislike smoking, but I'd love to catch a whiff of stale cigarette butts again.
1
Simply beautiful and oh so real!
2
Marlboro cigarettes? Perfume? Uggghhh
Aren't us Italians/Italian Americans lucky to have Grandma's Sunday Gravy and other undeniably very "good and wholesome" smells of real food.
What child of the 60’s could ever forget the smell of a piece of paper fresh from the mimeograph machine!
20
Delightful piece; thank you!
You say: "But I didn’t think about those smells as being special, because I had never not smelled them."
If I may...I would say that in fact you never smelled them, at least not consciously. One strange thing about smells is that you only notice what is a NEW smell, one that takes over what has been the dominant smell around you before — and that you had not noticed. Proof: the conscious awareness of that new smell itself vanishes quite quickly. It is quite a frustrating reality when you wish to continue to experience that wonderful smell but it will not remain, even if you concentrate. On the other hand, it is a welcome phenomenon when the smell is unpleasant. I suspect an evolution based mechanism, so that we always remain aware of any new smell that may be important to survival. My personal odd smell experience: everytime I smell diesel exhaust, anywhere, I go aaahhh Paris!
At age 50, I’ll still go to my late grandmother’s apartment building on Svetozara Markovica in Belgrade to re-experience the sour domestic smell of its hallways, its wet-cement courtyard, and the musky wood-and-steel smell of its rickety elevator.
Beautifully written; I’m sure I’ll reread this for years to come.
7
The fragrant scent of a steaming pot of Jasmine rice simmering on the stove.
2
Lovely, must find your book. My Belgrade was a decade and more earlier in the late 60’s when the unique Anarcho-syndicalists Yugoslav Workers’ Management System had drawn me to learn the language and study the country. Belgrade (Beograd) was splendid as Hitler’s air force had fire bombed the city for days as punishment for not let him through free to Greece and was mostly new and shinny a beauty; the smells Balkan. Hard times to come.
3
Lovely. Thank you.
1
My grandparents had homemade wine stored in their basement in and dried herbs from their garden, including braided garlic they bought in bulk. I would play in that basement in the summertime while my grandfather read his newspaper or worked on some project because it was the coolest part of the house. Occasionally he and I would eat lunch in the basement and I would watch him uncork a wine bottle from his stash. Sometimes, when cooking and I open a bottle of good red wine I remember the basement smell as it must be a combination of wine and herbs.
3
Wow. No matter what, I’ll remember this - thank you!
1
Hyde Park (part of Boston) 1966. 10 years old
Freshly mowed grass come May.
The waft of pall malls from all the WWII aunts and uncles downstairs (where did all their conversations go ...) .
Smell of deep fried fish (Georges Bank cod, of course) from the "Red E Take Out" in Mattapan on my Dad's pay day (Friday)
Take me home.
3
This is all so true! My most vivid Proustian memory took place during my first trip to Turkey in 2000, when early on, my cousin and I went to the Egyptian, or spice bazaar. Immediately, I said to him, this place smells just like grandma's kitchen, and he agreed. Then, it seemed, we encountered that comfortable aroma, everywhere we went. Our Armenian grandma had come to the US in 1907 from eastern Turkey as a child of 9, with her mother, and died in 1991, but those familiar smells never left either of us, and remain strong even today. I've returned to Turkey several times, and each time, those wonderful smells and memories are revived.
2
I am also brought back to my youth when I smell cigarette smoke. Further, I also believe home is in your mind. I can visit home but never live there. I keep it in my mind.
2
Too bad the author remembers stinky doorways. I remember the chestnut sellers on 5th Ave where you could buy a bag of (reasonably priced) hot chestnuts before skating in the outdoor rink in Central Park. I think the admission to the Wollman rink at that time was 10 cents.
2
I’ll always remember the smell of the pan fried hamburgers on toast my Danish grandmother would cook for us while we watched Good Times. She would say, ‘That’s what American kids eat!’.
1
Stradivarius perfume (by Avon), mingled with Jergen's hand lotion, and Old Overholt Rye: Grandma's house, early 1970s...
In the spring of 1967 my brother came to visit me on the Lower East Side. He was home from his time in the First Marine Battalion in Viet Nam. I planned to surprise him with a visit to an Italian grocery and deli that smelled exactly like the store we went to as children in the coal mining town we grew up in. There was the smell of herbs and spices, dried fish, aged cheeses, olive oil, and there were cookies and breads, tamarind syrup for we we called Italian soda, all the smells of our first generation Tuscan and Piemontese family. As we walked down the stairs to the shop I walked ahead of him and opened the door. All the smells of childhood flooded the air around us. As I turned toward him to celebrate my great surprise he stopped then sat down on the stairs and wept. All I could say was, "I am so sorry, so sorry." We sat there and cried together.
19
Thank you, Ms. Stefanovic, for your exquisite memoir of "smells like home" - Belgrade and your Mother smoking Marlboros. It's all about our paleomammalian limbic system (descended from reptiles and earth's first living souls) - which controls our basic emotions - fear, pleasure, hunger, sex and of course the mostly maternal care of our offspring.
The 'smells like home' I recall are the smoke of Camel cigarettes in our home, Guerlain "l'Heure Bleu" perfume which my young and beautiful mother wore, and Fleers pink double-bubble gum from World War II. Also the smell of Wechsler-coffee roasting in the Manhattan air (near the East River) at all seasons of the year. Also, our elementary school cafeteria smells (chow mein and rice!) and the divine odor of squishable Wonder bread and Skippy peanut butter. An American New York City childhood - not Belgrade - but ancient limbic memories for all of us humans, nevertheless.
2
What a fresh story. It took the stench out of the gloomy and depressing articles from the past year. My childhood smells are the ones that waft out from my family home kitchen, where something delightful was alway cooking but also the nutty smell of Muratti senza filtro cigarets. I grew up in the seventies in Italy.
8
How true. The smell of things may be the most ancient feature of our brain, helping us to reconstruct whole episodes of 'forgotten experience(s)' of the distant past. And the taste of 'home' is just a sample.
2
Apparently like several other commenters, I grew up in a world where almost everyone smoked - cigarettes, cigars, pipes. I could tell who had been in our house for hours afterward by the distinctive tobacco smells. I have never smoked, but the smell of cigarette smoke in an un-air-conditioned car always reminds me of my father. Don't smell it much anymore, and I'm sure that's a good thing overall.
1
Most enjoyable essay in a long time, thank you. By the time I got to the comments I was almost in tears. And, freshly cut grass very powerfully takes me back to childhood.
3
The musty smell of old books transports me to my grandparents' home on the Mississippi Gulf coast and the shelves of early 20th century National Geographic magazines that my grandfather saved and always shipped to wherever in the world they were stationed. Unfortunately, they disappeared in Hurricane Katrina.
5
Lovely story. My two grown-up children laugh at me when we all remember my "home-made bread" trick: I was a working Mom with a lot of working Mom guilt. Several times I was home before the kids got home and had one of those "bake at home" loaves of bread in the oven, hoping the kids would grow up remembering the smell of Mom's home-made bread! Didn't work!
Later in life I wore a certain perfume for years - Giorgio - my granddaughters would hug me and say, "Mmmm...smells just like Grandma!"
1
I too can confirm that smells bring back childhood memories instantaneously. My family left the Soviet Union in 1973, I returned for a visit 20 years later. I spent my first six years of life mostly living with my grandmother. When I walked into her apartment, in 1993, I recognized the familiar smells right away, and went into the bathroom to cry. I could not believe that I would remember these smells so strongly 20 years later from childhood. Overall, it was a happy experience and a very strong one, but I had no idea h the connection between smell and memory. NOW I DO, as do others .. Thank You for this article.. Well Done..
7
“ Do their memories make them feel......”. I recall often a line from an old TV series “The sadness of a happy time” . This is what I feel when an odd aroma hits me out of nowhere. Thanks for this ....acknowledgment of- commonality.
1
Thank you, Sofija. You have brought back so many memories just by reading your beautiful essay.
For my husband, who is Italian, it's the smell of a new book. Whenever he walks into a bookstore, before he picks out the book he will eventually buy, he will leaf through several, and fan its pages through his thumb as he inhales the slight breeze this action creates. I watch him sometimes as he closes his eyes and smiles. "What are you doing?" I asked half alarmed the first time I saw him do this. "Remembering my childhood in Italy".
7
Wonderful, yes. Grew up in Southern California's San Fernando Valley ("the" Valley) but now live just a mountain range over, in the San Gabriel Valley. The smell of mowed grass, orange blossoms, the smell you smell before it rains (more and more rare, it seems). The smell of coffee brewing (which is rare now, given that no one uses a percolator anymore). All of those take me home.
3
Thank you for writing this. A beautiful story.
5
I was born in Seattle and our family later moved to the dry, inland part of the state. My grandparents continued to live in Seattle and we would visit them at holiday times, which were some of our happiest. For days after we got back from a visit to them, I would inhale the slightly mildewy, Seattle scent that lingered on suitcases and clothes to prolong that happy feeling.
6
One of my most vivid Proustian memory triggers come from my early years as a farm kid - the smell of new-mown hay. It always conjures up mixed and complicated feelings. It has a pleasant odor associated with the summer season, but it also brings with it memories of much toil in the hot sun of mid-day. Later, while I was a young man serving in the Army, we were told that the nerve gas that could be deployed against us smelled just like new-mown hay, and that added another dimension to an already complicated smell-memory. This made me wonder, as I saw today's video footage of Syrian civilians killed by nerve gas, was their last sense experience in this life the smell of new-mown hay?
9
When I was in 4th grade (1968) and my sister in kindergarten our parents pulled us from school for 7 weeks from October to December to travel Europe. One of the stops was to Bialogard, Poland to visit my fathers relatives. I remember sleeping in my great uncles very humble house on a true feather bed waking up one morning to the smell of pumpkin spice muffins baking in the kitchen. Now, every Autumn when the bakeries and coffee shops pump out pastries and hot drinks with pumpkin spice aroma I am immediately transported to that house in Poland filled with the most gracious hosts ever. I went back to Poland last April to reconnect with those Polish relatives and their offspring and shared my memory. They, too, reminisced about that very smell their matriarch provided for them when growing up. Generations, family and countries connected by one single smell. Lovely!
15
The kitchen filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. Met me almost every day when I got off the school bus.
8
Spent a few years in Manila, as a child in the 60s. There were people living and cooking in the alleys. Recently was in the tropics and the cooking smells brought me right back.
5
Excellent - for me, far from Australia in Xian, China, the smell of street food.
Peppercorn leaves and sticky corns rubbed between the fingers, my grandparents' place near the beach at Frankston, Victoria.
For my son, now adult, Madame Rochas was his mother's scent.
Later, the smell of old ice cream in the local cinema, visited for movies on Saturday afternoons.
"interval us the best part" he would say, opening the fresh ice cream in its Dixie cup with its tiny wooden spoon.
3
I used to visit a small grocery store in uptown New Orleans which had a smell that instantly transported me back to my Grandmother's kitchen in North Carolina.
I never figured out what single thing or combination produced that smell, but I know precisely what Ms. Stefanovic is referring to.
8
Freshly ironed sheets that had been washed in Fels Naptha soap on the bed in my grandmother's house. Her massive linen cupboard's doors kept in the scent of cleanliness. Tucked up in a freshly made bed in her home, I felt safe and oh so comfortable and warm. Add apple pie, gooseberry jam, newsprint, Players' Navy Cut tobacco and the smell of the coal furnace (grandpa wouldn't update), and that was home to me.
26
Nice writing there, Heather....
1
A long time NZ colleague moved to Miami in the 70's with his Florida-born wife he met at a Midwest college. They soon purchased wooden house on an acre lot dotted with pine trees. a choice made because the house smelled so much like her childhood home.
Not too much later, they discovered the source of that memories-stimulating smell: the attic was heavily covered with mildew.
9
A few years back, I was visiting the Mazuria region of Poland. When I stepped out of the car, I experienced the scent of lake and damp, earthy smell of spring growing that immediately transported me back to my home state of MN. In a decade of living away, I had never been so homesick. About 18 months later, I took a job transfer to Warsaw. When people ask why I moved, I tell them about my interest in the job and how I loved the particular vibrancy and energy of a city rapidly growing in confidence and evolving - and both those things are true. But I do wonder if part of the pull wasn’t also that scent of lake life making me feel, if just a little bit, like I was moving home, too.
13
It is incredible to me that the ascent of our online world has left us with less and less of our olfactory and tactile worlds. It’s particularly jarring to see so many consumers turning to online sales to purchase perfumes which they cannot smell, clothes which cannot feel, food which they cannot taste. People seem to have forgotten that sight and sound are but two of our sensory inputs, and they cannot fill in the voids left by today’s ‘virtual reality’.
29
So true.
I realized shortly after my my last surviving parent died, that in the wanderings of mourning, I had sought out olfactory and tactile embraces from two time capsules of childhood -- a brackish beach at low tide, and an attic of memories perfumed by aromatic lumber rafters.
8
My grandmother's hand lotion (Jergen's) that smelled like cherries. Also, the inside of my grandmother's pantry, that smelled like cinnamon mixed with other spices. My mother's Arrid deodorant that came in a tiny, flat, round jar, and had a kind of astringent smell. All my younger siblings always smelled like Johnson's Baby Oil; I don't know what that smell was (floral?), but it was distinctive and meant baby.
21
My mother also used Jergen's hand lotion but more recently (maybe a decade ago) when I found some it was an almond smell. I am still drawn to soaps and lotions that smell of almonds. Yes, the olfactory sense is a powerful one that, I understand, is one that stays strong into old age.
4
This was a cool and refreshing story and a nice break from the usual serious, sad or depressing articles, so thank you for writing this Ms. Stefanovic.
As goofy as this sounds, the smell of gasoline immediately transports me back to the farm in Wisconsin where I grew up. My dad used to fill the tractor with gasoline and on occasion, he would let me sit on his lap while he drove it, plowing the fields in spring. I loved riding on that tractor, smelling the fresh, moist ground being plowed up while the soft, cool wind blew in my face. The smell of gasoline triggers such happy, secure and warm memories when I was a small child. How I still miss that farm.
The other instantaneous "proust phenomenon" for me is whenever I bake my mother's "Midnight Chocolate Cake" recipe which calls for unsweetened chocolate and butter to be melted together. The smell of those two ingredients waffling from the kitchen always makes me smile but also makes me a tad melancholy because that aroma reminds me of the many times my mother and I would bake together and how I miss her so dearly, even after her death 40 years ago. She was a wonderful baker and an even better teacher. If she knew how much I lamented still, after her passing, the first thing she would say is, "keep an eye on the chocolate and butter before it burns."
37
Gas fumes as a remembrance is not goofy at all! The smell of jet fuel brings me Montreal's international airport while bus fumes breathed in during school days plop me back in Paris.
5
I don't think I ever consciously noticed that my high school English teacher wore a certain perfume that not many others wear, but I was in an elevator once and smelled it. I was sure she was standing behind me. She was not, but the smell brought her back to me, even though I had never associated her with any particular smell before.
18
This reminds me of a lovely phrase from "A Natural History of the Senses" by Diane Ackerman, where she says certain smells will bring one straight back to one's childhood, "when both your parents were still alive." Over the years, I've thought of that often.
17
During one part of my career as a journalist, I had to pay regular visits to Japan's Finance Ministry. Passing through the non-air conditioned entrance in the summer stopped me in my tracks: the smell of the old, hot wood there was identical to the smell of my grandmother's front room. Then there are some bushes in front of the same ministry that instantly take me back to the pits built in to our next door neighbor's basement windows, where similar bushes grew.
6
The smell of the ancient (to me at age 6) wood lockers in the halls of William J. Onahan School in Chicago.
5
For me, it's the smell of jam sandwich packed with a banana in a lunch box that I used to carry to Kindergarten. I was a kid who hated school and the combination of these two brings back memories of those days.
6
I was in middle school and our English teacher had us close our eyes and she passed down the row holding something under each of our noses. Then we were to write the first thing that popped in our minds. I smelled something I didn't recognize but the image of a specific chair in my grandmother's house immediately came to mind, so I wrote about a brown rocking chair. When we finished, she revealed it had been tobacco leaves in a pouch - the kind for a pipe. I was totally confused. Later that evening I shared this with my parents. "Oh yeah, you used to sit in Papa's lap while he packed his pipe. That was his chair." Papa died when I was three - but that smell was stuck in my brain with that chair.
63
Wow, so good, thank you.
1
Summer- Standing on the train tracks in Osaka, Japan.. I'll never forget that smell .. Every time I go back it's still there; thick, sweet and wonderful .. I love Mr. Olfactory and Japan in the Summer.
11
Yes. Of course! I believe 21Pilots said it best:
“Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young
How come I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from
I’d make a candle out of it if I ever found it
Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I’d probably only sell one
It’d be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose
Same clothes homegrown a stone’s throw from a creek we used to roam
But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered
Out of student loans and tree-house homes we all would take the latter”
23
The first time I heard that lyric I burst into tears! So perfect.
My mother, Chanel No. 5. Walking in to her bedroom as she readied to go out for the evening. I don't wear perfume but I gravitate towards women who do, remembering those evenings of preparation. At those moments, she is with me.
16
In the 1950s and '60s our house was also redolent with cigarette smoke: my dad's Winstons, my mother's Salems, my brother's Camels, my sister's Marlboros, our renter's Old Golds. Apparently everyone chose a different brand so that no one would mistakenly swipe someone else's pack. It also simplified Christmas gift-giving. I was the only one who didn't light up, but I spent a lot of time inhaling everyone else's smoke.
My father, uncle, and brother all died young from lung cancer. My mother smoked into her 90s. I'm sure she smoked throughout her pregnancies: my brother (9 lbs), me (9.5 lbs), my sister (8.5 lbs). I'm not condoning anything, just reporting what happened. I was glad to get away from the ashtrays and the haze that hung in the air.
As for pleasant smells, those would be 1) my pony and 2) the small shoe repair shop in town. I would give almost anything to walk into an actual cobbler's shop once again.
15
So true, so well written. As new mom, an ex-pat, a dual citizen, this really hit home. And I have an overly keen sense of smell. I have had this conversation with my husband so many times. Thank you for putting it into words.
14
Miss Stefanovic's olfactory memory is something that stays with one forever. I can only sympathize with her that her memory is that of Marlboro cigarettes rather than of noble Cuban cigars. One of my childhood smells is of soy sauce from a factory down the block in the former Empire Mandchu-Di-Go (1931-1945).
5
Growing up in the 1950's, our house was a steady-state cloud of cigarette smoke thanks to my dad's 2+ pack-a-day Chesterfield unfiltered kings habit. I can still see the afternoon sunlight illuminating our living room smoke cloud. Being a kid, I just assumed this was normal as I daily inhaled large doses of secondhand smoke but without a cough or sneeze. It was just.....normal.
I'm now 69 and stupidly healthy. I never seriously took up cigarettes except for "recreational smoking" on vacation, the latest being my solar eclipse outing last year.
Smells do occasionally evoke memories, but it's music that truly transports me back to my past.
12
The evocative odor of my childhood was the Chicago Stockyards—a rich blend of cattle manure, rotting vegetable matter, and rendering plants.
12
What a beautiful reverie.
We swim in a world of senses our entire lives, overwhelmed as a rule by our cerebral machinations, but the very essence of our remembered life is in the scents of our experience.
Take heed, if you're young enough, to the physical byproducts of your existence... regardless of the significance you impute to your cogitations. The world outside your mind's control will dominate your memories in the end.
12
When I was a kid, before global warming, average temperature in Bogotá was 55 degrees. Almost everybody wore overcoat, or ruana - a kind of poncho - made of wool. Wool was the best system to store and transport odors throughout a home or a city. . My father initially transported the smell of Kool cigarettes, then Camel, Marlboro, and Nacional - a local brand -. He never smoked inside our home but the tragic aroma of tobacco was noticeable in his clothes. At the end of his life he was carrying the rare and thin aroma produced by the oxygen used to help him breath. I remember those odors very well. When I watch somebody smoking a cigarette, my olfactory system sends a message to the brain that always makes me think that cigarettes should only appear in horror movies.
21
The odor of Johnson's Baby Powder enraptures me, as does the feeling of a warm, wet washcloth on my face. I expect these old, old recognitions aren't just limited to smell, but include other senses as well.
5
Funny how a smell can do that. My daughter, who also has other disabilities, has never been able to smell at all. She does also have memory problems, and I wonder how they might be related.
Both of my children were born in the 80's, and we knew then that smoking was not good for fetuses and babies. My friends who smoked quit during that time.
Although my own mother was a social smoker (a pack a week? or one a month?) cigarette smoke was thankfully not a family memory, as my father and several of us were asthmatic, so she didn't do it at home.
5
Many years into adulthood, I visited the school where I attended first grade. The smell of cinnamon toast coming from the cafeteria hit me and I was 6 years old again.
22
My father smoked cigarettes, but never in our house, and quit cold-turkey the day the Surgeon General's report came out, but my mother, who was never a smoker, was horrified when she gained 23 pounds when pregnant with her first child-me. During her next two pregnancies she smoked to reduce wait gain-in the house! Whiffs of anyone's cigarette brings that memory back to me. and I was the smallest baby she had! Go figure.
13
My condolences.
My parents both smoked.
I had chronic bronchitis and later asthma long before asthma was fashionable.
My father managed to switch from smoking to chewing, but it was too late. His lungs never recovered. He died at the relatively young age of 72.
My mother was addicted to tobacco her entire life and used oxygen during the last several years.
It must be a wonderful feeling to work selling and promoting tobacco use...the same kind of wonderful feeling that narcotics dealers experience from their wonderful work getting young people hooked.
10
Thank you! Beautiful and so true. When I was 18 I traveled by myself to London. There was a big-city smell that stuck in my mind; not sure exactly what it was, but probably diesel fumes mixing with the rain. It doesn't sound romantic, but once in awhile I pick up that smell and it immediately reminds me of that fun trip.
23
I grew up in a town that was on one of the lines to Grand Central Terminal. As a child I was hooked on that first blast of exhaust, blowing horns, pretzels, hot dogs, and adrenaline, as I stepped out onto 42nd Street in the '50's.
6
The fragrance that hurls be back to childhood comes from our xmas tree.
In those days, miniature lights were around, but not too popular. The cool burning LED's didn't exist.
The large bulbs of the old fashion lights released the wonderful pine smell throughout the house.
37
Sitting in a restaurant in college, the sound of a cocktail shaker made me intensely homesick. My dad always made a whiskey sour for my mom before dinner. And the smell of cigars reminds me still of Uncle George who spoiled me rotten. Thanks for the reminder.
22
Beautiful. Thank you.
20
The olfactory nerve (sense of smell) enters the brain in the area where long term memory is stored. No wonder a whiff an a old smell can transport us back in seconds!
12
Beautiful. My father smoked cigars. I loathed the smell, but after his death, a whiff of cigar can bring me to tears.
25
Dear Ms. Day, Like you, the smell of cigar smoke is my "Proustian moment" with, amongst others, warm memories of my father outside in the waning sunlight watering the garden, after dinner, with the hose in one hand and his much-beloved cigar in the other. Unlike you however, I was never put off by that sweet, pungent odor, although I never acquired his passion for a good cigar.
9
Thank you for this great article.
The smell that reminds of of my childhood home is the smell of food that my mother used to cook for me and my siblings.
Many in my family cook that same food even today, some 50 years later, but they don't quite have the same aroma that my mom's used to have.
Motherly love is what's missing in the ingredients of everybody else's food.
I love you mom.
48
My mother was a smoker and coffee drinker. Now a physician, when I lean over a woman redolent of tobacco and coffee to hear her heart and lungs with my stethoscope I am transported back to Saturday morning cartoons in our suburban tract home.
36
Thirty-Plus years later, I noticed a scent that reminded me of my grandparent's house. It was mothballs. They owned few items of clothing, for season to season, and those that were once manufactured to last needed to be preserved, somehow.
24
Yes - my Grandma's little house in Austin. I had to ask my mother what that smell was - mothballs! You never smell them anymore, and we didn't use them in our house, so the smell only reminds me of Grandma.
3
Growing up in the 60's in an Italian family, the most familiar smell when I visited my aunts and uncles on Sundays was a mix of percolating coffee, simmering tomato sauce, meatballs, and everywhere else in the house, moth balls. My favorite smells of childhood were the corner candy store (newsprint and sugar), the ice cream store and bakery. And I still remember the smell of that varnish or wax used for the wood floors in the school gym; for some reason that always comforted me, though it was likely toxic.
45
Lovely article. Smell and music seem to be the most evocative in triggering long-buried memories.
31
What a fabulous essay. When I smell bleach, I am immediately transported back to the 1950's. If I close my eyes, I am in my childhood home's basement laundry room. It always makes me smile.
26
I remember the smell of my mother’s cigarette smoke while in the car. The memory reminds me of a great sense of security.
17
I have an olfactory memory from over 60 years ago. It was the end of May and I was sitting in the little library of my elementary school. My 9th birthday was about a week away and the end of the school year was approaching as well. Since it was a warm day, the side door to the library was open and I could hear a lawnmower as it cut the grass outside. The smell of the warm, newly cut grass wafting in the door and the happy thoughts of my birthday and upcoming "freedom" all combined to wash over me with a delicious feeling of contentment. Even now I'm transported back to that time and those feelings whenever I experience that smell on a warm day.
68
My favorite olfactory memory is newly-mown grass, too. I can always remember sleeping in on a summer day when I was a kid, then waking up to the sound of my dad cutting the grass. That scent always lifts my mood when I encounter it. It could be a fragrance called "Grass" like Kramer's "Ocean". Or maybe "Lawn" so as not to confuse people my age.
30
What a lovely piece! And yes, it makes perfect sense that we all have our own personal concoction of home.
24
Just great! Wonderfully written. Thank you.
44