Smells of Childhood

Memory is a strange thing. I have so few true memories. Memories that are full and complete. Unquestionable in their integrity. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that I can’t put together. My memories are like a child’s treasure box. It’s filled with trinkets and remnants; nothing that connects with the larger whole, just pieces of things that used to be a set, or actual pieces of something that used to be whole – a bottle cap with the letter “E” written on it; a small rubber ball with swirls of color inside; a shiny shard of metal attached to a string; a note with a secret written on it; an old shoelace from my dad’s boot. Nothing that really tells a story itself. It’s my attachment that gives it value.

My memories are like bits and pieces of something that I think they should look like but I can’t quite seem to make whole. Like finding a piece of beach glass, forest green or cobalt blue, with smooth edges and a definable shape. The shape gives you an idea of the original piece, but you’re still unable to assemble the original piece of art. My mind is a collection of beach glass, shiny pebbles and sea shells; but with no recollection of which beach they came from. So I’m easily influenced when someone doesn’t agree with my memory; when they say that it’s not the way it happened. I shrug my shoulders and accept whatever version they have of the events. “okay.” I think. “I guess I’m just remembering wrong.”

But I do have a memory of smells. Smells don’t help me remember any more than normal, but they bring back specific feelings. They bring back deeply real feelings. And while I have a ton of memories for my dad I have no real memories of my mom. I don’t’ remember my mom feeding me as a child, comforting me when I was hurt. I don’t have specific memories of my mom at my choir concerts, her face smiling and hands clapping. I don’t remember her helping me ride my bike, running along and giving me encouragement. I know she did all of those things because I have the pictures. But I don’t have any real memories.

The memories I have of my mom are much deeper than that, almost primal in their form and location in my mind and memory. They involve smells. I have a handful of memory smells that are as precious as the contents of that child’s treasure box. And every time I smell those smells, the memories come flooding back, but more importantly, the feelings fill me with the love and kindness of a mother.

There are a handful of smells that bring certain feelings rushing back. Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies are incredibly comforting to me. My mom would bake cookies for us all the time and the house would fill with the warm and dark smell of dough and chocolate. I would come home from school and the house would be filled with the smell of freshly baked cookies. Fresh laundry transports me to a time when someone cared enough to make sure I was dressed in clean and mended clothes. The fresh laundry smell moves me to a place when I was young and had few responsibilities and my mom always looked out after me. And the smell of fresh dirt is almost spiritual. As a kid I hated being in the garden, I hated weeding and I hated mowing the lawn. For all the days filled with sun and grass where I was forced to work outside, my feet green and my fingernails black, working in endless rows and beds of flowers and vegetables. Even now the smell of dirt makes me feel connected somehow to the earth and plants, to the water and soil. I love that smell, but don’t tell my mom. All these smells remind me of certain times, but more importantly they remind me of feelings that I have about my mom. She was amazing, kind, loving and protecting. She looked out after me. She loved me.

I recently discovered a smell that is smaller than the others. Its so old and little used that I barely found it. It’s like that small glass Indian bead in the corner of the treasure box that almost got lost and forgotten. But the day the smell hit me I was transported to just a moment, a second in my life that really meant something special and important. It is completely unlike all the others.

I was walking through a store, when the memory surfaced. I was in the produce section and the sameness of my options was underwhelming. I had seen it all and had cooked it all. Then something caught my eye – like little brown walnuts, only with smoother skin. I couldn’t identify them. I walked over and found their tag – chestnuts. “Like, chestnuts roasting on an open fire?” I thought. “Weird.” Then there was something, light as a feather in the back of my head – a tickle of a memory. I had eaten chestnuts before… somewhere… with my mom. It involved coldness and heat, tinfoil and flame, salt and butter. A flash of memories hit me like hail on a stormy day. Nothing really anything to fight against, but it definitely left me feeling wanting. I picked up the chestnuts with excitement and curiosity. Was I making the memory up? Had I really had them before?

I took them home and started to research. It wasn’t long before I had a recipe and my first batch of chestnuts in the oven. The oven heated and popped and not long after my first batch of chestnuts was out of the oven. Even then I wasn’t sure. The chestnuts came out of their foil wrapping, cut and pushing up through the thin brown skin. The white meat of the chestnut hot and welcoming. I cracked the first one open and peeled back the shell, dipped it in the creamy melted butter and sprinkled just a bit of salt on the top – and then I stopped – stopped and smelled. I smelled the small chestnut for just a moment and immediately knew I had eaten them before. The feeling came crashing back.

But more than the flavor or the smell, it was the memory of being with my mom on a really cold day. A flash of memories. Coats with collars up. Gloves and ice. A bitter wind and the smell of something roasting. Tinfoil coming out of the fire and roasted chestnuts, the first and only time I would eat them. A little salt and butter and my mom’s smile. Knowing that I was loved and looked after. That she cared for me and all would be well. All of that came back to me as I unwrapped the chestnuts and inhaled the memory that wafted up into my mind.

When I cook and eat chestnuts now I can’t help but smile like I’m a kid riding a roller coaster. It makes me happy to eat them. And it’s not the chestnuts that make me smile, not directly. It’s the memories that go with them. The warmth of being out with my mom, the love she showed by taking me some place fun, the kindness of buying me something I had never experienced. All that and things I can’t even put into words comes to me when I eat them. The soft meatiness, coated in butter and salt, make for an amazing memory and remind me how much my mom loved me. How much she still loves me. The second batch was delivered, by hand, on foot, from me, to my mom’s door.

“Hey.” I said, as she opened the door. “Do you remember these?” We both smiled, she hugged me and closed the door against the cold I had just came from. She couldn’t believe I had found them and had almost forgotten the time we had eaten them together. I turned my collar down and handed her the little tinfoil wrapped package, the steam escaping to remind her, maybe even of different memories. But we enjoyed ourselves and each other for a few minutes. Then I went back to my own family to share with them a bit of my own memories, built from the smells of my own childhood.