Comments on: How do your memories smell?

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:22:47 +0000

I lost my sense of smell about 12 years ago after having a bike accident. Of all the senses I could’ve lost, I’m glad it was that one (doc said I was lucky to be alive!). The thing that the doctors can’t figure out is how I can still taste things – I can taste the difference between an apple and a potato for example. I hope sometime that science will find a way to fix it because I do miss my sense of smell (I don’t know what my wife or my daughter smell like – handy when changing nappies mind you!). Occasionally (every 6 months or so), I get my sense of smell back for a couple of seconds, I don’t know if it’s a remembered smell or it’s genuinely returning. The smell is always in context…

By: xcali-ber

xcali-ber — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:32:32 +0000

I used to have a friend who lost her sense of smell at the age of 8 (she was the victim of a hit-and-run accident while on her bicycle). She chose a lot of her foods based on texture; for example would eat crunchy cereal mixed into frozen yogurt. It’s strange though because she swore she hated the taste of salad dressing and would instead put ketchup on her salad….

By: Ashley

Ashley — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:39:43 +0000

Smells usually go the opposite way with me: a smell can (obviously) evoke a memory, but more than often for me it’s a memory that evokes a smell. So I can’t really describe any smells tied strongly to memories, because to me the only way to say them would be that something “smells like December, 2006,” or “smells like going to Changing Hands bookstore with Keera”. Those smells could be anything from lavender to sweat but that’s just not how my mind identifies them.

By: Sara

Sara — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:22:23 +0000

The smell of a pipe (the tobacco kind) immediately makes me think of my grandfather. The smell of fall is a favorite – something coming from the leaves I think but it’s just in the air. I also recognize a smell as “Florida”. I can’t describe it but sometimes I will walk outside and think “it smells like Florida”.

My grandmother lost her sense of smell due to a bought of scarlet fever as a toddler. I never asked her about it specifically, but I remember that she put orange juice on her cereal, because she was lactose intolerant so couldn’t use milk and didn’t mind the grossness of the combination because she couldn’t really taste it anyway.

By: Meghan

Meghan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:30:56 +0000

“My Grandpa smoked a pipe, and it smelled heavenly – like vanilla and flowers, very sweet and warm, more like incense than tobacco.”

Rusty, I’ve been trying to describe the smell of pipe tobacco for ages. Thats exactly what it smells like to me! Thank you.

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:48:16 +0000

Hoppe’s 9 (a gun cleaner) will always remind me of my dad. He would clean his gun in what we called the “hunting room” at night. I would go in and read him stories like Encyclopedia Brown and we would solve the mysteries together.

By: Snue

Snue — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:19:52 +0000

My husband had a head injury as a teenager and the resulting surgeries made him lose his sense of smell. He likes his food spicy. He’s very self conscious of body and breath odors. He likes to tease our children when they make some comment about how something smells good, by saying sadly, “I don’t have a sense of smell.” I always want popcorn at the movies and he doesn’t, which we attribute to the fact he can’t smell it.

By: Mizdeliverance

Mizdeliverance — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:02:11 +0000

No question whatsoever – for me it’s the smell of one of those cheap plastic Halloween pumpkin buckets full of (or recently emptied of) candy. That artificial, sticky sweet fragrance can make me feel absolutely awesome and happy and just about any time of day any time of the year. Even more so if somewhere in there is the scent of candy corn. Sheer nirvana.

I have vivid recollections of sitting on the front porch with my friends, sticking my face in the steadily emptying bucket and just feeling all blissed out. Can you tell that I have some fantastic childhood Halloween memories?

By: rodenial

rodenial — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:48:10 +0000

Vanilla makes me calm and cozy. Reminds me of baking which relaxes me.

Men’s cologne makes me feel creepy. Unfortunately, usually any creepy guys I encountered were wearing too much.

Baby smells: powder, lotion, pampers, makes me feel creepy too. I dont’ care for babies. Kinda has the same effect that clowns have on some people.

:uB

By: Marco McClean

Marco McClean — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:59:38 +0000

I put my nose and tongue against my grandmother’s old metal screen door when I was four, and I remember thinking the smell and taste had something to do with death. That might have been connected with how upset everyone was about JFK’s assassination. And once when I was five I was climbing on the high fence behind my grandmother’s garage in hot summer and I lost my balance and fell flat on my back on a stack of dust-dry planks –it knocked the wind out of me; I was sure I was going to die, that this is what dying is like. Since then, when I’m working in an attic or under a house and I smell very dry old gray redwood it stops my breath for a moment, then that goes away and I’m fine for the rest of the job. And I remember hot asphalt and shoe rubber from the playground when I got sick at school in first grade and just lay down where I was; I can smell that now by just thinking about it. On the plus side, there’s the smell of the freshly-laundered white linen blouse of a girl I liked in high school. I’ll be forty-nine in a month, and the smell of freshly washed clothes is still a sexy, happy smell to me. I hate perfume and deodorant and powdery makeup smells and always have, especially in the theater.