Smells Are Fuels for Time Travel

Across the Fence #322

It’s time to talk about smells again. I once read that smells are one of the main triggers to memories. How true that is for me. We’ve all experienced this. It’s like a time machine powered by smells. Take a moment and try to remember some smells that have transported you back to another time and place.

The warm smell of fresh apple pie or chocolate chip cookies, fresh from the oven, takes me back to the kitchen of the old farmhouse where I grew up. I can see Ma and Grandma Inga with their aprons on, opening the oven door to check the progress of the pie and the wonderful aroma filling the room. I see Ma placing chocolate chip cookies and date-filled cookies on the kitchen counter to cool off, and me getting to sample one, still warm from the oven. It was hard to tell if they were any good eating just one, so I’d beg to have a second one. Can’t you just smell and taste those cookies based on your own memories of similar experiences in your life?

I was reminded of this when we received a package of chocolate chip cookies from Alice (Sherpe) Parish, who lives in Arizona. Alice sends them to us every year around Christmas time. She remembers how my mother had sent me a box filled with chocolate chip cookies for Christmas when I was in Vietnam. It took forever for those cookies to arrive, but when they did, they didn’t last long. I shared them with my buddies and they tasted better than any cookies I’d ever eaten, even if they were rather hard from being in transit for so long. We didn’t have microwave ovens to heat things up in those days. But, there was always C-ration coffee to dunk a cookie in.

It’s great to still receive a package of cookies at Christmas, thanks to Alice. She’s even thoughtful enough to include some cookies for Linda, made with Splenda. Alice said she still thinks of my mother sending cookies to me as she bakes them each year. Now when I think of chocolate chip cookies, I think of both Ma and Alice. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Linda and our daughter, Amy, also make darn good cookies.

There are many farm smells that take me back in time. The smell of fermented silage finds me up in the silo on a cold, winter day. Each fork-full of silage I throw down the silo chute releases the sweet-smelling silage. When David Torgerson and I were talking one day, he reminded me that I haven’t mentioned those frozen silage ledges. Everyone who has worked in a silo in the winter, knows how it would freeze around the outside edge. Sometimes it would be many inches thick and you had to chop at it with a pick-axe. Sparks would fly as the axe banged against the silo blocks. You ended up with heavy, frozen chunks that would bang against the sides of the chute as you tossed them down. The cows never seemed to mind if it was frozen. They always ate everything up.

Of course there’s also the sickening smell of fermented silage when you got down to the bottom of the silo pit in the spring. That was not a good smell! Not all smells bring back good memories.

How do we distinguish between good and bad smells? I read some research that mice and humans both have about 1,000 sensors in their noses. Who sits around and counts these sensors? We do have the upper hand on the evolutionary scale over mice though. Humans can identify 10,000 odors, whereas the lowly mouse can only identify 5,000. Again my question is, how does the mouse tell the researcher it can identify a smell. You see, I don’t take everything someone tells me at face value. I like to ask those tough questions, such as, if a person has a big nose, does he also have more sensors and do smells affect him more? Dogs have great noses for picking up smells too, but at least I don’t feel the need to roll around in every nasty smell I come across. You’ll never find me rolling around in new-spread manure on the hayfield behind our house… at least not on purpose!

I will admit that the smell of manure (not liquid manure) brings back memories of wallowing around in it. I ended up rolling in it a couple times when I slipped off an icy board while pushing a wheelbarrow full of the “sweet-smelling stuff” from the barn to the large manure pile behind the barn. Admit it, some of you have probably been there too.

Not all smells in a house are pleasant either. Marjorie Haugen remembers her family sprinkling white sugar or cinnamon on the burner of a hot, wood-burning stove, to get rid of bad odors in the house. The heat released pleasant smells into the air. It was an early form of air freshener, before the canned variety.

Some other smells that come to mind are new-mown hay, freshly overturned sod, Lava soap, a wood-burning stove, and the summer air after a thunderstorm. All these smells bring back memories of moments we’ve experienced. Smells, both good and bad, are the fuel of our personal time machine.