the smells of our homeland

rupert giles once said that knowledge should be smelly, referring to his general dislike of computers and his fear that their purpose was to replace books. personally, i think that certain kinds of knowledge are dependent on smell; it is the most powerful memory trigger we've got. the right scent is as good as a document for certain memories; here are a few of my more powerful favorites:

lemon-scented dishwashing liquid: when i was a kid still in the single digits, i had what i called a fairy wand--a twenty-inch dowel of wood with a piece of wire that had been wrestled into the shape of a star affixed to the top. it was less a fairy wand than a bubble wand, and while i never quite got over the disappointment of learning that the bubbles it created were not actually star shaped (they were comfortable in their roundness, after all), i loved that wand and spent hours in the backyard spinning around and creating giant bubbles with a bubble solution my mother carefully prepared for me, using lemon-scented dishwashing soap and lots of warm water. when i smell it, i'm suddenly six again, spinning at the top of the steep hill that was our backyard, blissfully unaware that inside the house my mother's life was falling apart.

vanilla: when i was a teenager, i went through a shoplifting phase. among the many trinkets and baubles i liberated from their capitalist oppressors was a vial of vanilla-scented perfume oil with which i was absolutely besotted. i wore it every day, through driver's ed, through learning to smoke, through alcohol poisoning and my subsequent five-year cessation of drinking, through endless choir practices and parties where the boys i fancied never knew my name; through skipped periods spent sneaking off campus to aroma's and hours spent lurking downtown waiting for my mother to come pick me up after work. now, whenever i smell it, it's may 1996, and i'm sitting in my blue car in the parking lot at school, waiting for the pent-up heat to dissipate so i can give ben a ride home; on the way, we get into an accident which tears my car in half. i still have no idea how neither of us got hurt.

bonfire: more high school memories. when it was warm enough (and sometimes when it wasn't), the carass would pour ourselves into as few cars as we could muster and drive to the beach at north salmon creek. we'd find some driftwood and build a bonfire, drinking and smoking and laughing and talking until the sun came up or the highway patrol kicked us off the beach. my hair would smell like bonfire for the next three days, because i loved the smell so much i wouldn't wash it out. for me, it was the smell of belonging, for the first time in my life.

windex: i thought i was so fucking cool when i got the job at concrete jungle. i'd always wanted to work there, where the punks bought their docs and the skaters stocked up on the best gear. they played rock music and had chain link on the walls to offset the loud plaid carpet; they sold the best shoes and rob zombie had an in-house account. it was also the single worst working experience of my life. it was a long, hot summer where i spent hours cleaning the display cases because no customers came in and i was being monitored by CCTV to ensure that i wasn't just standing around (whether there was anything to do or not); where i got yelled at for making a mistake after having been trained for just 25 minutes and then left alone in the store; where i was frequently told i was going to be fired if i didn't sell at least six pairs of shoes a day--difficult, when you only have two people come in over the course of your entire shift. the summer was a good introduction into the way the real world works for me; it certainly prepared me for the fact that things are not always necessarily going to be as cool as you think they are. which is an important lesson, though not necessarily one you want to be reminded of every time you pass a clean window.

one good thing about that summer, though--i got to meet tom waits. who is as tall and quiet and shy as you'd never ever expect.

burning building: that strange, acrid miasma of burnt carpet, plastic, metal, wood and fear that gets released when a building burns down. i first smelled it on september 11, standing on the ferry watching the city burn as the port authority evacuated me. i smelled it again a year later at biscuit's; turned out that the smell came from a duane reade that was burning in queens, but even that news didn't cheer us. it remained a strange, drawn evening for us both, as we remembered everything that happened that day. i catch faint whiffs of it on the breeze from time to time now, and even the barest hint makes my blood run cold.

what are some of your smell memory triggers?