Smell Your History

It’s been said many times that smell is the sense that triggers the strongest memories. For instance, the smell of babies and their assorted powders and lotions catapults me right back to the days when I held my own babies close and felt calm and loving and grateful. The smell of orange blossoms in the open air always transports me to my youth in Phoenix when orchards were a more prominent part of the landscape. And then there’s the smell of beer breath, which never fails to remind me of that guy I had a crush on in high school, until he burped his beer from across the room.

While I was lazing in bed yesterday morning, I gazed out my window at the queen palms, crepe myrtles, and redbuds fluttering every which way in our windy backyard. The temperature of my room felt cool and dry, and something else in the air struck such a familiar chord it sent my mind back to days long-since forgotten. Instantly, I was my eight-year-old self, leaving the house for school, and I saw the world not through the eyes of an adult, but through my eight-year-old eyes. I hurried down the porch steps, stirred up dust on our well-worn footpath, passed through our chain-link gate and crossed the dirt-and-gravel field to busily trafficked 7th Street, the macadam only just cooled from the drape of night. 

At 7th and Alice, I joined other kids on their way to school too. I felt the morning crosswinds on my face and it filled my lungs with an indescribable feeling of joy that I surely ignored back then. Most Holy Trinity’s bells rang loudly from several blocks away, and I passed the Catholic school kids, herded by their black-robed, reputedly scary nuns who served double duty as crossing guards. I walked with the crowd, observing the kids around me (most much taller since I was the “shrimp” or “runt” of all my classes). After the Catholic school, I turned left down the dirt alleyway behind the softball fields, cut behind the bleachers and the snackshack, and cantored down the hill separating two large playgrounds. I walked past the swings and slides, all the way across the blacktop where I was the four-square champ, to my third-grade classroom where I awaited my second-grade sweetheart, who would never show up.

There was so much sensory detail, I didn’t want this journey back in time to end, and I had to wonder if I had somehow hypnotized myself into remembering so much so clearly. But the pounding on my bedroom door came, and my sweet little Destructo called out to me, wafting something from his diaper. The link was lost, and there was no going back. Not then anyway.

As writers we have to place ourselves in many different locales and scenarios to give our readers that sense of “being there.” This is especially true of memoirs. If we can tap into our own history through imagery and relaxation, we can make our descriptions more vivid and “real.” I strongly recommend starting out, not by recalling what something looked like, but what something smelled like. From there, all kinds of history comes to the fore, attached to its respective sights and sounds, tastes and feels. If you really want to remember your life, smell it.