“For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past…”
Goodbye To All That, Joan Didion
Smell is perhaps the most enchanting of our senses. Sight and sound and touch are all concrete. They are like navigational instruments that guide us through the world, they tell us where we are and help us trace the path to where we shall be. When one hears the doppler of cars passing by, and sees the orange hand lit up in a yellow box upon a metal pole, and feels the rubber knobbing faintly poking up through the soles of our shoes, then we know we are waiting at the edge of a busy intersections crosswalk.
Smell is much different though. It’s a much more primordial sense. It speaks primarily to the lizard hidden in our brain who acts more on impulsive instincts. For example, the appearance of rotten meat requires prior knowledge on what it typically should look like, but the smell produces an instant disgust response that tells our little lizard brain to stay away. And unlike the sight of it, this is not learned. It is programmed within us, much like the shock of pain.
And there is such a wondrous variety of these responses that we are born with. Like the smell of a lover, which inspires not disgust but desire, or the tantalizing fragrance of a good meal. Even more fascinating is smell’s resistance to being remembered; even after listing all of these scents and having them front and center in my mind, I cannot really conjure their smell in my nose.
This isn’t about the parameters of smell though. I’m sure there’s a boundless amount of papers on that subject from people much more versed in the olfactory studies than me. Instead, I am writing about smell’s most powerful lever upon our minds: its ability to inspire vivid memories.
When I stepped into the kitchen this morning, I was struck by a very unique smell, that of my family’s yearly vacation rental at the beach. It was an incredibly fleeting sensation; as the memories finally crystallized, the scent had already vanished. But in my head, it was as though a primer had gone off. Like my mind had been shot out of a cannon and careened not across a physical distance but a temporal gulf. Not only did I see those fishing nets hanging on the walls and the TV sat upon a white wicker stand. I saw them from the eyes of a child, unburdened by all of the years of growth that separate my experience of the world from hers.
I can see my cousins who have all but one grown and flown away from the place of our upbringing in northern Maryland. I can hear their voices and laughing, and for a very brief moment I can once again know the feeling of my uncle’s presence, lively and jovial as he always was before cancer took him away. I remember how he and my father would play in the kiddy pool with me and my cousin. They would imitate great ferocious sea monsters and chase us around the small playsets installed in the shallows.
Beyond the Jolly Roger water park where we would play, there is the candy stores where my grandmother would always take me to buy treats and plush animals. She’s senile now, and she can barely hold up a conversation. It’s a tragic reversal; the grandmother becoming like a child and her precious munchkins, her old nickname for me and my younger cousin, becoming the adults. I wonder how much she remembers those moments.
The last time I set foot in Ocean City, Maryland was around four years ago. I went with my brother and his now ex-girlfriend, and we stayed at her family’s vacation house in a private neighborhood. It was not as nice as it was back when I was a child. But I suppose a place like that, drenched in nostalgia, can only really be visited in our heads.
These memories, they appear like a spirit only summoned by the precise burnings of special mixes of incense and herbs. But there is no oracle here guiding the ritual. Instead, only a random wafting of scents up my nose, just as random as the events that have slowly diverged us all from that point in time twenty years ago.
I often wonder about what memories lie beneath the grey matter. What memories are buried too deep, yet ready to speed towards the surface when another fragrant zephyr strikes my nose? And I also wonder, what things will become part of these strange memories for a future me, and what scent will recall them to my mind? Hopefully it’s a pleasant one.