I came into the office one morning in early November and was immediately hit with the most godawful smell. It was a familiar one. It seems like almost every year, as soon as it starts to get cold at night, a mouse or two decide it feels better inside our printshop. Not being a fan of finding poop on my desk, I put out traps and, inevitably, the mice always end up finding them on Friday night after we have left for the weekend. I guess as soon as it gets quiet, they go out looking for the party spot. Needless to say, by the time we get to work on Monday morning, they can be a little ripe!
I spent an hour that morning looking for the source of the smell only to discover that the mouse was apparently dead INSIDE the heat duct system. Lovely! Every time the HVAC unit kicked on, Eau de Rat was blown all over the building. Blech! Candles and Bath & Body Wallflowers were no match for the odor either. I think I used an entire can of NI-712 Odor Eliminator that first day.
The orange smell of the NI-712 got me thinking and took my mind off the smell … for awhile, anyway. The smell of oranges or tangerines always makes me think of Christmas. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I think it has something to do with the holiday gift baskets mom used to get from freight salesmen when she was the manager of the Order Department at BASF’s Chemical Dye Division in Charlotte. The baskets were filled with citrus, nuts, hard candy, and these teeny tiny jars of jam or jelly that I always thought were so cute!
I’ve always loved the smell of oranges and lemons. Mom used to make a blend of tea, Tang, lemonade, and clove and cinnamon spices she called Russian Tea. I’m sure my Belarusian sister-in-law, Svetlana, would not endorse that name for the concoction, but I absolutely love(d) it. The spicy smell of the tea served hot is as comforting as the taste.
Thinking about that tea that Mama usually made around Christmastime reminded me of her famous (to us) Fruitcake Cookies. As soon as the grocery stores started putting out those candied red and green cherries and candied pineapple slices near the holidays, she would buy several containers of each. I remember sitting at the table with her, chopping the candied fruit and pecans into tiny pieces, then stirring them into the dough that got dropped by the teaspoonful onto cookie sheets and popped into the oven. The recipe made a ton of cookies (6 dozen, I think!) that Mama would share with friends, neighbors and family. I hate fruitcake, but I LOVED those cookies. They smelled so wonderful as they baked that I couldn’t wait for them to cool enough to start eating. I was the official taste tester every year and burned my tongue more times than not.
My grandma’s Chicken Pie was my absolute favorite food smell growing up. I think of it every time I pop a Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie in the oven. They smell nearly as good while cooking, but Grandma’s pie put Marie’s to shame. Grandma didn’t fill her pies with vegetables. Hers were stuffed to the brim with the meat of a whole chicken she had boiled and pulled from the bones and thick gravy made from the chicken broth, flour, butter, salt and pepper. Her homemade pie crust was the topper, though: flaky, brown, and crunchy it smelled like her biscuits baking.
Thinking about the connection to smells and memory reminded me of learning about “the Proustian moment” in my college freshman year Honors English class. In his book In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust wrote: “… I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.” I think everyone can relate to that passage. We’ve all smelled a smell or tasted a flavor that suddenly transported us to a distant, familiar place or time.
That class, reading that passage, was maybe the first time I thought about the connection between emotion, memory, and scent. Writing a paper about the book, I dwelt on that passage, and remember mentioning that the scent of L’Air de Temps perfume was always immediately comforting to me. It had been my mom’s scent of choice as long as I could remember and smelling it made me feel instantly in her presence where I always felt safe, protected, and loved. When she passed in 2001 I took the bottle of perfume from her bathroom counter and one whiff of it today, nearly a quarter of a century later, can bring back a flood of memories of the times we had together, from mundane Saturday mornings cleaning the house to much anticipated shopping trips together.
To this day the smell of Love’s Baby Soft cologne brings back junior high drama and anything in Revlon’s
Jean Nate scent reminds me of my dorm room at Appalachian State University. Lemon, bergamot, and lavender, three of my favorite scents, were mixed in the deodorant and body splash I used every morning. And, to this day, the smell of Brut cologne for men takes me back to the many years in a row that I searched out Dad’s favorite Soap-On-A-Rope for Christmas.
Not all the smells that evoke my good memories are pleasant ones, surprisingly. The smell of a burning cigar reminds me of my childhood best friend Angie Kerley’s dad, Wayne, and the baby blue Maverick he hauled us around in. One whiff of skunk or of cow manure takes me back to the Sundays on my Grandma Cartner’s farm in Iredell County. I had never seen a skunk around our house in Mecklenburg County, but never failed to see (and smell) one dead by the side of the road within a mile or two of her farm. Recently, my husband and I were in Harmony, NC where my Dad grew up. I mentioned I wouldn’t mind moving there. Darryl instantly said he wouldn’t consider it because of the cow manure smell. I said, “That just smells like home to me. You get used to it.” He was skeptical, to say the least. I was reminded of my grandpa’s (a dairy farmer) purported statement that cow manure “smelled like money” to him.
The Eau de Rat smell in our printshop lasted a week … but it wasn’t all bad. It got me to thinking about all
the smells that lead to good memories for me: the smell of popcorn, that evokes the quiet, relaxed comfort I used to feel in dark theaters; the smell of baking Toll House cookies that remind me of spending quality time with my nieces before Christmas when they were small children; the smell of Hawaiian Tropics that brings back the feeling of having all day to do absolutely nothing in my teenage summers by our backyard pool; the scent of Sea & Ski Lotion that will be forever tied to memories of life guard rented floats and riding the waves at Windy Hill beach with my big brother; the old, musty, venerable smell of the sanctuary at Hopewell Presbyterian Church which will always remind me of my youthful Sundays in Sunday School, preaching, youth group, Girl Scouts, and my Saturday wedding in June 1985 when I was a twenty-year-old jumping off the ledge into adulthood.
Robin's Eggs 