Kathy: It's the smells for me. My Dad's cologne. The Sunday Roast after church. Burning leaves meant school and football season.
Tabitha: I have a lot of smells as well. My maternal grandmother's walls were made from knotted pine, thus her cabinets were also pine. I remember the smell of her linens from those drawers, the smell of her fried chicken. I remember my dad's Old Spice cologne, my paternal grandmother cooking collard greens (yuck!) LOL! The smell of her dried apples when she would bring them inside. Gosh, I could go on and on. Smells trigger a lot of memories for me.
Carol: A long time ago, my Dad used Old Spice. I was a toddler and managed to get into their bedroom and cover the room with it! Mom never let him buy it again, ever! LOL
Patsy: Gardenia and Magnolia. Good old southern fragrances.
Marla: Okay White Linen that my mom wore. Mimosa blooms remind me of being a kid, climbing those trees when I was little and pretending I was a princess. And yes, the bayberry candle!! My mom has one she puts out every Christmas and I have to sniff it every time. Christmas!
Jackie: Evergreen and cinnamon... brings back memories of the holidays at my parents' house.
Yvonne: Hollyhocks, four o'clocks and pink climbing roses take me straight back to my Grandma's back yard in a little bitty Kansas town when I was a kid. She had the best house!
Ada: Bayberry candles! My mom had this Christmas candleholder my gramma gave her, and every year she burned the bayberry candles in it on Christmas Eve. My mom always made all kinds of good food, so all the baking smells (must try Armenian katah!) and the bayberry candles.
Frankie: Sandalwood. Barnes & Noble had that going a few weeks back. Sandalwood inspires spirituality--love it. Definitely my favorite scent, and I use it a lot in my rituals.
Michelle: Grease, exhaust, transmission fluid, brake fluid, rubber tire smell: All meant Daddy was home from work (he was a mechanic and service manager the automotive part of a car dealership). To this day I can walk into a repair shop and relax because it smells like Dad. :-)
Robert: One particular Texas wildflower, unidentified... Very sweet, generally detected when it's 95+ outside and there is little or no breeze. Very strong memory trigger for summers spent in Valera with my grandparents... unfortunately, it is associated with a strong scent of Calamine lotion, for during said summers, chiggers made up about 3% of my body weight....
Noel: Stearic acid. Like millions of others, the smell of fresh elementary school supplies, namely boxes of Benny & Smith Crayola crayons, their fragrance an ingredient that livens the colors and makes them stick to paper. The olfactory bulb is connected to simpler states of mind, native and abiding.
Ada: Anyone besides me old enough to remember the old mimeograph machines schools used? with the papers with the purple print? my mom was a teacher and were definitely school smells like that and those remind me of her too. :) Frankie: I remember those Adabee! Love those smells, too! Shawn: Those mimeo smells--yeah. I remember that smell coming down the hallway at school, leading us right to where Mona B (our fav lady sect'y) would be standing cranking away on that thing and we’d hang out and chat. Nice memories.
And then I added a couple of my own : Fresh raspberries. Reminds me of summer days as a tween and teen in Puyallup picking raspberries. And later, pulling up to the fruit stands to select flats of them to take home, usually spilling some in the car and then attempting to find a spot for them in the frig. Fresh dill. Mama making pickles at 908 13th St. NW, and then years later the fragrance of her dill bread rolls wafting up the stairs in Astoria… ;+)
Thanks for sharing, everybody! These are beautiful, as are you.... :+)
Shawn
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photos courtesy of: Okay, so I didn't keep track, but they're on the I'net...
1 comment:
Lilac's remind me of my grandmother. She used to have a lilac bush outside of her front door. Every spring, she would be get the most beautiful lilacs and she would often cut some and bring them inside. Whenever I smell lilac, I go back to spring in the 1970s when I was just a kid.
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