Have you ever sensed a smell only to have a memory from your past come screaming out at you?
This happened to me today.
My wife had fixed a nice lunch and I was working my way from my home office to the kitchen when...WHAM...a smell...and I was greeted by the most wonderful memory from my childhood.
I would guess that this "memory smell" found me somewhere around the age of 9 or so. The memory has my grandmother in the kitchen preparing breakfast. She always made me waffles with my grandfather's home-made maple syrup.
My grandmother always had a fruit for us at breakfast as well. This particular memory has her serving strawberries fresh from the garden. I can also hear the old fashioned coffee pot perculating on the counter behind my grandmother.
It was her house, however, that I smelled. Not the food.
Her house was a late 1800's, or perhaps early 1900's farm house that she and grandpa had remodeled over the years. I suspect the smell, of the house, permeated from the basement. She had a fruit celler down there repleat with a dirt floor. As a kid we were also a little frightened to go into the basement as we feared we might run into a mouse.
Even though the floor was dirt, it was meticulously maintained and a casual gaze would find shelf after shelf of produce from her garden.
Another favorite thing for us to do, as kids, was to open the "deep freeze" and look at grandpa's frozen pike. Grandpa love to fish and his freezer was always stocked with fish from his fishing trips.
Anyway, it was a nice surprise to have some random smell whisk me back about 40 years or so.
Has that ever happened to you?
