Walking the Maxwell Farm loop the other morning, I caught a vagrant whiff of cows on the breeze and I don’t mean cows’ breath. I had a teacher once who insisted that the shit of ungulates was not offensive, but he wasn’t a dairyman and I suspect had never been inside a cow barn in deep August. But the encounter reminded me how evocative smells are and how they are sometimes lost in the welter of other kinds of description we use in our writing.
Petrichor—love the sound of that word—is the smell of earth after a rain. History has it that the reason we might find the scent so pleasant is that in ancient times, it would have made us aware that rain had fallen after a long dry period, a boon to life. But beyond that explanation, I would bet you smelled it the instant I named it.
I do wonder if some of the more evocative scents of my youth are lost to most people. I wouldn’t recommend it necessarily, but I can recall the specific odor of the outhouse at my uncle’s farm in Starks, a mix of everything you’d expect overlain with the acrid smell of powdered lime. Who will be left in thirty years who will remember that smell?
There are smells that speak to us of danger, or at least caution: gasoline, propane. I remember the stink of kerosene in the stove in the Waterville apartment I lived in my first year out of college and wondering if my roommate and I were ruining our lungs. Of course both of use smoked at the time. Chlorine reminds me of days at the pool in the YMCA and the L Street Bathhouse, my unremarkable athletic career except for the one race I won that no one expected me to.
What makes smell so evocative is its connection to memory. The olfactory cortex in the brain is in the temporal lobe, which is the location that manages emotion and creates meaning. A single scent—a perfume, say—recalls a person, which opens up an entire section of memory, a flood of imagery.
Which makes it odd that you don’t see as much of it in writing as I’d think would be useful. Could it be that the association to a smell is too personal to ascribe to a fictional character without a ton of explanation? Just because I have a specific memory attached to Cinnabar perfume, can I render that believably in prose? Or is it that the memory reaction is a nonrational response, so the best a writer can do, without getting all weird and flowery, is say something like “the smell reminded her of . .” which is both clunky and interrupts the flow of the story?
There are the moments when a smell is an entire story. What smells trigger your memories? Your stories?
I have a very distinct memory of tarry lines (ropes) in the loft of the building we used on rainy days when it was too wet to be out learning to sail. Generations of nautical types had stored all sorts of odds and ends of rope in the loft. The tarry smell marked how old the space was since tar hadn't been used for line protection for many decades. We'd crawl up in the loft to get away from close supervision. I don't have detailed memories of what we did up there - just that lovely smell. Like Lapsang Souchon tea...