WEEK 14 :
SCENTS AND SMELL
SCENTS AND SMELL
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across
thousands of miles and all the years we have
lived,” wrote Helen Keller in her autobiography. “The odors
of fruits waft me to my southern home, to
my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors,
instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to
dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I
think of smells, my nose is full of scents
that awaken sweet memories of summers gone and ripening
field far away.”
Though Helen Keller’s words are made more poignant by the
fact that she was blind and deaf,
we all have this innate connection to smell. It seems to
travel to our brains directly, without logical or
intellectual interference. Physiologically, we do apprehend
smells more quickly than other sensations,
and the images aroused by smell act as beacons leading to
our richest memories, our most private
selves. Because smell is so intimately tied up with breath,
after all, a function of our bodies that works continually, day and night, keeping us alive, it keys us
into the memories that evoke the continual and flow of experience. The richest smells can be the most
innocent: the smell of a BarbieDoll, the
smell of Play-Doh, the smell of the house right after your
mother cleaned (the hot dust inside the
vacuum, the tart scent of Lemon Pledge), the shoes in your
father’s closet that smell of old polish. Or
smells can be more complex: the aftershave your father wore
the day he lost his job, or the scent of a
baby’s head. Smells can be pleasant or unpleasant: The
perfume of a soft ocean breeze or the stench of
rotting garbage or burning rubber; the odor of Grandma’s
sumptuous apple pie or the scent of a burnt
and ruined meal; the smell of flowers blooming on a warm
spring day or the smell of something that
made you feel ill.
What are the smells that you remember, the ones that, even
in your memory, make you stop a
moment and breathe deeply, that make your heart beat faster,
or make your palms sweat? Write about a
sense of smell that for you is a powerful memory trigger. Do
you remember the smell of your
grandparents’ House, the smell of freshly cut grass, the
sweet smell of cotton candy at a carnival, or
the smell of a dentist’s office?