Putrid Smells are Comforting
Growing up I was always surrounded by a mess of different scents, some perceived as good, and some perceived as putrid. One scent that will stick with me for a long time that many people hate, is the smell of the rotting decomposing discarded trash at a landfill. My father, when I was younger, was a carpenter, and on more than one occasion he would bring me to a job site to help him clean up. On those days, we would get to go to “Trash Mountain”. I remember at first I did not like the smell, not in the slightest, and I would put my nose in my shirt as we cleaned out the truck bed of the various pieces of rotted wood, drywall, and broken windows.
However, over the years, I have come to find comfort in the stench. To the point if I am having a bad day, I make sure to take Exit 7 on I-295 to pass the landfill. This smell that is perceived as bad has connected my father and me from when I was a child till today.
In Diane Ackerman book, A Natural History of the Senses, she talks about how “smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once” (Ackerman 1). There are certain smells that are like those land mines that Ackerman talks about. For many people, an example of this “poignant landmine” would be the wafting smell of a turkey roasting on Thanksgiving morning.
One memory that I have for turkey, that I have remembered since I was in 4th grade, is my uncle cooking a turkey the night before Thanksgiving and the amount of ruckus it caused, because it was just something you did not do. The stereotypical mixtures of savory and sweet smells that are contained in the air. Smells can evolve person to person and day after day. What smells absolutely terrible today, can be a comforting smell years later.
I liked how you talked about the evolution of how smells can go from being really awful to pleasant. Also when you talked about the turkey cooking in the oven on thanksgiving I could really imagine what that is like because I also experience that on thanksgiving. (though I do not like turkey so I just smell it and watch others eat it haha)
ReplyDeleteI definitely relate to how smells that you might hate can smell comforting years later. I used to hate the smell of smoke, but now I kind of like it because it reminds me of my grandmother.
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of bad-smelling things are associated with more visceral memories in some cases than nice-smelling things. One bad smells that will always trigger a memory for me is smelling sewage in cities like Boston or NY. When I was a kid and we would visit my grandma living in NY, I would always smell that really distinct sewer smell that only exists in cities, and now when I go to other cities and I smell something just like it, I always get pulled back to my childhood. It's kind of interesting in a slightly sickening way. I used to hate the smell of gasoline, but now it's not that bad to me.
ReplyDeleteI never really thought of things associated with having "bad smells" to also have the capability of evoking memories, so I really enjoyed reading the story of you and your father. Now that I think about it, the smell of rotten eggs reminds me of my fifth grade trip to museum that used to be a mine. The guide handed us a piece of sulfur, which smelled like rotten eggs.
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