Lust for Lilacs

My old house sits there, occupied off and on by any new person seeking an Airbnb when they pass through the small coastal town in Midcoast Maine. In the summer, they will stroll around the four-acre property sitting on a hill that overlooks a marsh with more birds and frogs imaginable. The renter, probably booked it in Airbnb for convenience, as it is close to downtown and large enough to accommodate families or a group of friends. The convenience is priority and for unconcerned renter, the property does not affect their stay immensely. The memories once made by my siblings and I playing on the swing set or sledding in the winter is completely separate from their stay in this newly renovated Airbnb. They may never lay eyes on the crumbling drywall made from horse hair because the house was constructed as an 19th-century farmhouse. They may never uncover the Sharpie on the back of the kitchen cabinets that lists mine and my siblings names. And they will certainly never experience the lilacs the way I did. The same 20-foot bush that towered outside my bedroom window and wafted warm, sweet fragrances into my room with the gentle breeze. They will never sit on the front porch and admire the deep purple of the flower buds, but become absent and depressed when winter arrived and the buds died with the season. Now, that death has come to me as grief. Grief for something I will never experience again. Knowing I have memorized the route home since I was just a young child, predicting every speed bump and bend in the narrow road. A home that will never be mine ever again. 

     (Nora's childhood bedroom view)

Memories from scent are triggering, as our brains directly use scents as a conduit for memories and nostalgia. As Ackerman writes in a Natural History of Senses, they are critically linked to emotion. "Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth" (Ackerman, pg. 22). That tripwire is buried sometimes deep within our psyche, lashing out when stepped over. We can do our best to remember things the way they are as preserved relics in our brains, but that unpredictable scent you smelled over and over again as a kid will always take control of your neural pathways and hoist you into an emotional recollection.