THE MIND'S NOSE

In my mind’s eye I’m young – thirty something – until I look in my mirror.  But my mind’s nose knows no age - it looks in my memory, not in my mirror. Nostalgia comes in many forms. I’ll hear a tune from the Sixties and I’m swept back many decades, perhaps to the place when I first heard that tune   I’ll go through one of my many picture albums and start remembering when – and wishing I was there. A stray memory can bring up an aroma; a stray aroma can also bring back memories

I made whole-wheat multi-grain bread today.  The aroma in the house is just wonderful.  It reminds me of going with my Mom to the local bakery when I was a kid.  You’ve heard of ‘comfort food’, how ‘bout ‘comfort smells’? I love the cinnamon of apple pie or coffee cake, the tang of spaghetti sauce (easy on the garlic!), beefy charcoal-broiled burgers, and Thanksgiving turkey.  What’s on your comfort smell list? I’m betting it will have a lot to do with cooking.

I remember the delicious aromas - hot dogs, corn-on-the-cob, and cotton candy - from Coney Island, and the smell of getting there on the subway.  When we lived near Albany, New York, my husband and I went to the New York State Museum in the opening weeks of the New York City exhibit.  I hadn’t been on the subway in years, but stepping into that old A-Train car brought back the memory of so many subway rides.  I was delighted that the car still had that unique, perhaps electrical, smell.   Several years later when we took visitors to the exhibit the smell had been washed away – I suppose from the building’s air conditioning.  What a disappointment!  I may never again get to sniff that smell first hand, yet the smell is in my head, filed away in its proper cubby hole.

Do you remember the smell of an old-time drug store?  In my adult years I found out that it was from B-vitamins.  And now I know the smell in the dentist’s office was cloves – oil of cloves was used as an antiseptic and a tooth pain reliever. I’ve got the smell of school tucked away in my memory, lots of chalk dust in the air, and the smell of Crayola crayons carries me back over sixty years.  I’ve got Channel No.5 tucked away too: that was my Mother’s perfume.  

Many candle and household products companies have made a bundle on the smell of clean laundry, among other comfort scents.  I remember my Mom bringing in the laundry on a freezing day.  The sheets and clothes would be stiff from the cold, and the smell would be of fresh, fresh air.

There are ‘today’ smells of which I’m not particularly fond: gasoline, tire rubber, Bowater paper mill in the early morning, the smell of the fitness center at the Lake House. Even the smell of the chlorine in the pool makes my nose wrinkle when I first walk in.  There are some nasty smells we all recognize, and perhaps they’ve got memories associated with them, but I don’t need to dwell on them here.  No – I’ll close this trip down my olfactory memory lane with a suggestion for your own trip: go shake out and sniff some baby powder.  I’m sure your mind’s nose will bring up some lovely memories.

The candle companies can reproduce some wonderful aromas for the mind's nose