Olfaction
Recently, my grandmother moved into a sweet apartment in an assisted living community. Every time I go to visit her, I bring a few objects from her house, giving her the opportunity to say, yes, I want to have that here with me or no, I do not need that now. When we picked up and moved from the house that I pay for but cannot live in to my childhood home, I knew the totems I wanted to bring with me: the sandstone piece that holds books open, the “writer’s block” with Virginia Woolf’s photo and signature, the small plastic box that holds business cards, the wood strips that hold 3×5 notecards. These are all of the things that define my desk space for me, the space of creative production. I understand the role of small objects in eliciting the experience of home.
What has surprised me is the role of smell in memory. I can look at an array of objects around the house, objects that have been here since I was a child. Sometimes they remind me of my past, or particular memories, but they do not evoke memories in the same way as smell. When we first arrived in the house, we slept in the bed that I slept in as a teenager. An antique bed frame with a terrible mattress. We were eager to move into the master bedroom. When we moved, a week or so into our adventure, despite changing the sheets, the mattress pad, and airing out the mattress, there was still in that bed, the smell of my parents in my childhood. I cannot say what really constituted the smell, it seemed to be a mix of perfumes, deodorant, make up, and humanness. I could not escape that smell. Buying another bed became an inevitability for me–the only way I could find to escape the olfactory memory of childhood in the bedroom.
And the king-sized mattress worked. The bedroom no longer smells of my childhood. I no longer feel like an interloper in my parents bedroom. But the linen closet in the bedroom, right off the bathroom, the linen closet that I cleaned and washed with ammonia three years ago after my mother’s death, the linen closet that now has only our towels, new sheets we have purchased, and toiletries we have purchased and use, that linen closet still smells like my mother. Every time I open the door to get a towel or pick up sheets, or grab a new tube of deodorant, I am transported to early 1980s and my mother is somewhere inside the house, cooking or cleaning or puttering. I cannot banish the smell from the closet. Washing it makes no difference, leaving the door open does not lessen it. I think that smell, the smell of my childhood, will live in that closet forever.
At some point, I will pack up my desk, pack up the candles and books at the side of my bed, touch the sandstone then wrap it in something soft, secure the paper clips, wrap the cedar chest, but I will not be able to capture that smell of the linen closet. I will be happy to leave the smell behind; when I open the closet door, I feel an overwhelming sadness, a sense of loss, the eighties gone, my mother gone, my sister gone, and there it all is back again in a second in the scent of the closet. I will be happy to not have this olfactory memory as a part of my daily life. Although I wonder if there will be some point in my future when I will be hungering for memory, when memory will be slipping away, and I will be sniffing for a scent to bring it all back to me.
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