The Smell of Home
Last week a friend told me that she was reading a French novel in her university literature class. It was called Remembrance of Things Past and was written by Marcel Proust. She told me that in that book, a man bites into a little cookie called a Madeleine and that the taste of the cookie makes him think about the past. For me, it is the sense of smell rather than the sense of taste that brings back happy memories.
The aroma of pipe tobacco always makes me smile. I know most people feel very differently about the smell of tobacco, but I like it for a simple reason: My grandfather used to smoke a pipe, and I adored my grandfather. After an especially good dinner, he used to settle into his favorite chair and go through a long ritual of filling his pipe with something that looked like dead leaves and smelled of apples. Then he would light the pipe, lean back, and smile. The grandchildren gathered around him while he smoked and told us stories about when he was young and travelled the world on sailing ships. I felt safe and loved sitting near my grandfather while he smoked his pipe.
Another wonderful smell is the scent of sweet rolls just coming out of the oven. When I was a child, my mother used to bake sweet rolls every Saturday. The children helped mix the dough with sugar and cinnamon and shape it into little balls. Then we eagerly watched the timer as it counted down the minutes until the rolls were done. After my mother took out the hot rolls and placed them on the counter, the children mixed water and sugar into a paste. When the rolls were cool, we spread the paste over the rolls. What a wonderful aroma! My mother let us eat one right away. We were very happy and secure there in the family kitchen with the smell of sweet, hot rolls.
My favorite aunt always wore a perfume that smelled like roses. My aunt was a tall and large woman who had lots of blond hair and wore flowered dresses. Her perfume was just like her: soft, friendly, warm, and cheerful. She had a lovely singing voice, and when I spent the night at my cousins' house, she would sit in the bedroom as we fell asleep singing old lullabies in her rich, low voice. I fell asleep under the blankets to the smell of her rose perfume and her soft songs, feeling cared for and content.
These are just three examples of smells that I associate with happiness and safety. I don't know anyone who smokes a pipe these days, so I rarely smell pipe tobacco. However, I have my mother's recipe for sweet rolls, and I sometimes bake them for my friends. I like to wear more than one kind of perfume, but whenever I wear my rose perfume, I think of my aunt. Smells bring back wonderful memories.
