a. I have cried because of a smell. Well, my eyes welled up, anyway. The tears may not have quite spilled over.
b. I have never had feelings of nostalgia over a smell with no associations, and I find it fascinating that it happened to you. It sounds like the feeling I got from reading The Chronicles of Narnia as a kid.
I can't even remember where I was or what the circumstances were, but one time a whiff of a smell instantly transported me back to a summer trip to Zambia in 1988. It was the smell of the brush burning in the (somewhat) controlled annual fires. You'd think that all such fires would smell the same, but I've lived in three states with forest fires and they don't smell anything like it at all. Only once in all these years was I sledgehammered with the instant memory of walking down a sandy trail in the Kalahari, bugs streaming across the path, fleeing from the fire. It brought back the sound of the drums at night and the smell of the church on a hot Sunday morning.
1 comment:
a. I have cried because of a smell. Well, my eyes welled up, anyway. The tears may not have quite spilled over.
b. I have never had feelings of nostalgia over a smell with no associations, and I find it fascinating that it happened to you. It sounds like the feeling I got from reading The Chronicles of Narnia as a kid.
I can't even remember where I was or what the circumstances were, but one time a whiff of a smell instantly transported me back to a summer trip to Zambia in 1988. It was the smell of the brush burning in the (somewhat) controlled annual fires. You'd think that all such fires would smell the same, but I've lived in three states with forest fires and they don't smell anything like it at all. Only once in all these years was I sledgehammered with the instant memory of walking down a sandy trail in the Kalahari, bugs streaming across the path, fleeing from the fire. It brought back the sound of the drums at night and the smell of the church on a hot Sunday morning.
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