Smell is one of the most important and complicated senses; it triggers great nostalgia for me, but I can't even begin to put it into words. Walking into the kitchen, I smelled all sorts of food my dad was cooking or experimenting with (we were his guinea pigs). Sizzling stir-fry with fresh vegetables from the garden, the warm steam off a bubbling pot of broccoli cheddar soup, roasted vegetables with the strong, sour smell of balsamic glaze, and the most nostalgic dinner: cornbread with rice and whatever beans we had in the pantry. These scents are hard to describe because they connect to so much more than the food itself. They bring back specific moments, people, other connected senses, and feelings that I might not recall clearly without the smell attached to them.
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| My Dining room where all family dinners take place |
Green says that smells are the hardest sense to describe, yet somehow the most vivid, even though they fall into our short-term memory. This idea often connects strongly to my own experiences because I am able to recognize a smell immediately as soon as it hits my nasal cavity. Still, I often struggle to explain exactly what it smelled like without using the word that it originates from. Instead, I can explain how it brings me back to a specific moment in time. Smell can transport you to a memory without even realizing it. Smell works differently from the other senses because it can bring back an entire feeling, not just a snapshot in time.
Incense holds a strong place in religious ceremonies and rituals within the Jewish faith and other religions. I am in no way religious. I have never been to church, never read the bible, and never prayed. Still, incense holds some sort of faith in my mind. Though I do not associate it with any particular religion, I associate it with comfort, family, and the sense that the world is not a scary place.
This makes me analyze Green’s discussion of scent as something that can create meaning beyond ourselves and the physical scent. The incense in my childhood home was not a religious matter, but it still became a sort of personal ritual. The smell is and was a familiar environment that I am still connected to. It connected me to people that I loved and the safety of being in my own home; it came to be symbolic for me. I do not hold faith in a religious sense, but I have faith in the memories that the smell represents to me.
The smell of patchouli incense filling up the house, and my young eyes watching the magical smoke billow from the burning end. This smell always reminds me of happier times when things were less complicated. I could play outside on the swings without worrying about deadlines or how many words I needed to hit for a paper or getting somewhere on time. It triggers memories of sitting at the table or couch with my parents and older siblings, talking or just absorbing their presence in a calm silence.
It gives me faith that my parents and siblings will always be there for me, even in the hardest of times, to encourage me in whatever I dream of doing, and that they will be with me my whole life, although death eventually comes for us all. It will always be there as a reminder of my childhood home. The smell of burning patchouli will always be a reminder of home. Even as I grow older and my life gains more complexity, I still have that scent to bring me back to a time when I felt safe.
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