Have you ever caught a random whiff of a scent that has instantly transported you to a different time and place? There’s a lot of focus on the senses of sight and hearing when it comes to triggering memories (for better or worse), but I’ve found that not many talk about one’s sense of smell in that context.

When I was a young child, my grandfather used to smoke pipe tobacco. He had a few pipes, and with his spectacular handlebar mustache that he waxed every day, it always made him look so fancy to me. The cornflower blue car that he drove (I wish I could remember the make and model) always smelled of leather and pipe tobacco, even long after he quit smoking when I got a bit older. Eventually he sold that car and got something else to drive, and of course that car didn’t smell the same. Well, fast forward a few years to about twenty years ago, I was walking home from the bus stop after school, and suddenly I was overcome by the very specific smell of leather and pipe tobacco. Immediately, I was back in my grandfather’s old car, which I had always loved because it had a robot voice that instructed us to fasten our seatbelts when you turned the key in the ignition (an exciting futuristic thing back in the 90s!). I had moved out of state by this time, hundreds of miles away from my grandparents. That car was long gone and my grandfather had quit smoking long before. I was walking in the middle of a road with woods on each side, that had no cars or smoke anywhere to be found. There was no source of the smell that I could identify anywhere! And yet, leather and pipe tobacco was in my nose, and my mind. Sometimes people say that if you smell a random thing like that, it’s a person who’s passed on revisiting you. But my grandfather didn’t pass away until about seven or eight years after this bizarre olfactory experience. To this day, I vividly remember it happening but have no idea of the source of it. I think I called him as soon as I got home, just to make sure all was well.

It’s harder to appreciate now that we’ve had a good long run of anti-smoking campaigning in this country, but when I was growing up, smoking was an omnipresent thing. Restaurants used to have smoking and non-smoking sections. Every house had ash trays, because either you smoked or you had them to accommodate friends and family who did. Both of my parents were heavy smokers, especially my mother who started smoking at age 11. This did not change when my mother replaced my father with my stepfather who was also a heavy smoker in spite of a bad heart condition. I used to joke that if I ever wanted to try smoking, all I had to do was take some deep breaths inside my house. When I went to college, if I walked by someone who was smoking a cigarette, the smell of the secondhand smoke rather cheered me because it reminded me of home at a time when I was still adjusting to being away from home and on my own. Eventually, the more time I spent away from the smoking, the better I felt, the better I breathed, the more I grew to really abhor the odor of cigarette smoke. I think I was so used to it that I never was able to register it as unpleasant until I learned what things were like in its absence. Besides, smoking dulls your senses of smell and taste. My parents never seemed to notice the damage it would cause in the environment (smoking indoors wreaks havoc on the interior of a house!), but once I wasn’t accustomed to it, I couldn’t not see and smell it. There was nothing I could do about it when I visited my family’s house, but in my own living spaces as an adult, I realized I could direct people not to smoke there, which eventually I did. I kept an ash tray or two for them to use outside when they visited; in hindsight, I’m a little surprised they respected this boundary, albeit with an occasional grumble. Six years into not going anywhere near my mother, I am at a point where smelling cigarette smoke triggers some unhappy olfactory memories that make me very glad society has worked hard to minimize opportunities for smoking in public places.

There are plenty of pleasant aromas that bring back great memories for people, myself included. The smell of roses or rose scented soap always reminds me of my aunt and makes me smile and wish I’d remember to call her more often. The smell of my marinara sauce as I cook a big pot of it on the stove recalls my Italian heritage and makes me proud to have learned this tradition along with other recipes I love to make, even if they make me think of my mother from whom I learned them. The scent of lavender is cool and soothing and piney and reminds me of the sparse evergreen woods near where we would stay when vacationing on Cape Cod; for many years it’s been a scent that helped me through countless flashbacks and nightmares. Old books smell like home to me, because for so long that’s exactly what they were.

That’s the crux of the matter for me, I suppose. All memories in my mind and body have a double sided nature, like an “old fashioned” audio cassette tape. Olfactory memory is as strong as any other type for me, especially now that I’ve had years away from the toxicity to let my burned nostrils heal and enable me to sniff it out for what it was. Even today though, as Robbie describes below, I still find myself choking on the smoke from time to time, despite my air being clear. The imprint of those fumes continues to linger.

But here’s the key point, which I feel pretty proud of, when thinking about my memories in these metaphoric terms: I have no ash trays in my house.