Smell Memory

I decided to boil some yarn tonight. Don’t ask. Or if you do, make sure you really want to hear the answer. I tend to do strange things when David travels. Anyway, I was boiling this beautiful peacock blue wool yarn and I happened to lean over the pan and sniff. I was immediately transported to Aunt Naomi’s cabin the Pennsylvania mountains. The wool smelled exactly like waking up on a chilly morning on the ancient brown fold down couch which Dave once described as more of a bun than a bed, partially smothered in musty down pillows and threadbare quilts. It smelled like the creaky floor and the wood burning stove and the pump out back and 17 cousins sitting around big table trying to figure out how to work the 1930’s electric toaster. It smelled just like my childhood, and for a minute—just a minute-- I was there. I was eight years old pulling daddy long legs off the screens and playing jacks on that creaky floor.
There is something about a smell memory that transports me like no other. Not pictures, not movies, not sitting around at family reunions confessing long guarded secrets. I don’t know why. It doesn’t happen very often, but it is the closest thing to time travel that I have ever experienced. Like the time I took my kids to Cabin John Park, the most fabulous playground of my childhood. I loved that the metal slide still looked 50 feet tall, that the little blue passenger train dutifully made its loop around the woods, and that Porky the Trash Eating Pig was still going strong, inviting children in that same chesty voice to feed him lots of paper and wrappers and even scraps, but please, no glass—it gives him a tummy ache. But it wasn’t until I pushed open the door of the little shop and breathed in the magical combination of snow cone and popcorn and cotton candy and old chewing gum and the anticipation of 30 years worth of children that I felt the time shift and I was a kid again, experiencing that smell for the very first time.
I wish it happened more often. There are lots of things I would love to live again. I guess I will just have to wait for the perfect scent to waft my way and carry me back in time. And I hope one day that I will be walking down some street in America, or trying a new recipe in my Texas kitchen and will somehow find the perfect smell that will transport me back to a misty fall morning, waiting for the fresh, hot waffles to be passed over the counter to warm my hands and make me glad for the years spent in Belgium.