Smell is powerful evoker of memories.
A candle just snuffed out immediately takes me back to my Catholic upbringing. White and red robed boys appear before me extinguishing the candles after mass. A marble Jesus dies on a cross against a backdrop of red brick.
In the spring, lilacs watch my sister and I walking to school. We stop to smell and I get too close to their aroma and scratch my eye on a lilac bush. Lilacs are still my favorite flower. I cannot get close enough.
Sage in a prairie field and there I am with my Mother who says she loves the smell of sage as she rolls a piece between her palms. I know now she was remembering the reserve where she grew up, the crushed sage to her nose.
2 comments:
The smell of Dial soap and Fig Newtons remind me of my great-step-granddad. Songs bring up a lot of memories for me as well. When I'm listening to an old cd, certain memories of things that were going on when I first listened to those songs will crop up. Sometimes it makes me remember the bad times, but I don't stop listening. In fact, it's better to keep listening, over and over again, to create new memories with those songs to overwrite the bad ones.
Yeah, I agree with zeb. I wonder how things would taste if I couldn't smell them. I was just thinking of that yesterday. Seems like the days I have a stuffy nose, things don't seem to taste as good.
Smoke: Late nights deep in the mountains, the crackling of fire, the silence of the forest.
Sage or manure: four years in the county, helplessness, restlessness.
Roses: a summer with my grandmother, snap peas and fresh strawberries.
Ink, toner, or glue: paper and ancient presses, the sound of sheets slapping down quickly (shhik! shhik! shhik! shhik!), the sound of a blade through reams.
Baby formula: my tiny nephew, basketball-sized, curled up on my shoulder as I dance and sing him to sleep.
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