Leslie Budewitz | The Scent of Memory

You’re walking down a street past an open window, and all of sudden, you’re in
your grandmother’s house, a pot of her red sauce bubbling on the stove and the
family gathered for Sunday dinner. You look around, startled—it’s Tuesday, your
grandma’s long gone, and you’re hundreds of miles from your childhood home. But
someone is stirring up memories, in the guise of marinara and fresh herbs.

Or you’re sitting in a conference room. Others file in, and for no reason at
all, you flash on your college boyfriend, a man you’ve barely thought of in
thirty years. Only then do you realize someone in the room is wearing his
cologne. Before your conscious brain even recognized the scent, and put it in
context, your memory took you back.

We’ve all had that experience. Turns out, our sense of smell is related to
memory more closely than any other sense. Researchers have identified a
physiologic reason for that connection. Smell is one of the oldest senses, and
it’s located in the limbic system, the same part of our brain where memory
resides. Our senses of touch, sight, and hearing are located in other regions,
making their connection to memory less instant—we might have to think, albeit
quickly, where we’ve seen a particular object or to identify a sound or a song.
Researchers also say that memories evoked by smell tend to be more vivid than
memories evoked by other senses, which may be why I often dream of campfires on
nights in late August when the wind shifts and carries the smell of distant
forest fires in through our bedroom window.

In writing my Spice Shop mysteries, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, I’ve thought a lot about smells and memories. They often have seasonal connotations. Many people associate cinnamon and nutmeg with autumn—because that’s when we eat pumpkin pie and drink pumpkin spice lattes. Both spices feature prominently in holiday baking. You’d never sprinkle thyme on eggnog, but a glass of lemon-thyme tequila seems just right for a hot summer day, doesn’t it? As a college freshman in Seattle, I was puzzled by the scent of fall. It smelled of leaves changing, releasing their tannins and other chemicals, hints of salt and algae and diesel in the air. It did not smell like fall in my hometown, Billings, Montana. Not until I returned for my junior year did I realize that what I was noticing was the smell that wasn’t there. Billings is home to a sugar beet refinery, processing the harvest from early September well into November. The odor is sharp, slightly acrid—not unpleasant, but not like Seattle. And if I ever caught a whiff of it elsewhere, my mind would zip back to those early years before I knew it.

Literally.

Is there a specific memory you associate with a particular smell?