scent memories

Hello,

I have always been fascinated by memory and the function of nostalgia.

When I went home for Thanksgiving last year, my parents opted for the return of our ritualistic trip to San Antonio for the holiday. We stayed at the same hotel as we did six years ago. We ate at the same restaurants, went on the same long walks, watched the same holiday boats parade past our balcony. As we sat on a bench along the Riverwalk, my mom handed me a tube of hand cream. It was the brand of Chinese lotion we used throughout my childhood. Every morning during elementary school, my mom would oversee the washing of my face and then dab the lotion onto my cheeks, my nose, my forehead, and my chin. This is still the application method that I employ for face cream to this day.

I’m not actually sure why we stopped using it. I think for a while my mom couldn’t find it in the US, and this was before overseas shipping was as accessible as it is now. The smell of that hand lotion brought me back to those cold water mornings in Mississippi and Tennessee and Texas. I asked my mom if she remembered as I rubbed my hands over my face, held my fingers over my nose to inhale deeply. I had not experienced this smell in years, and it made me feel eight years old again.

It’s been proven that scent memory is the one that sticks. The olfactory bulb in our brain makes a straight line for the limbic system, which includes the amygdala and the hippocampus — reductively simplified here as the centers of emotion and memory. As defined in the Proustian moment, emotion and memory formulate the concoction for potent nostalgia.

Freshman year of college, I was taken to one of my first house parties, and the host sat with me on the floor and showed me her bookshelf. I barely remember what she said about her books, but I have never forgotten her beleaguered sigh as she said, “My ex just walked in. I knew it immediately from the smell of her perfume and cigarettes.”

This phrase alone probably wrought irreversible damage to the construction of my adult self.

One of my new roommates in DC is a proper perfume fanatic – an aficionado, if you will. He lives in the basement, and displayed upon a short, four-tiered shelf in his cave are more perfumes than I’ve ever seen outside of a department store. Not long after moving in, he gave me a tour of these scents, including but not limited to notes of rose, vanilla, toothpaste, expensive ink, and a library. There was one that smelled exactly like my mom’s make-up bag when I was a kid and I would play with her old lipsticks.

I like that smell is a shortcut to memory because I worry about all the little things that I am bound to forget. I’ve actually found, in the course of this newsletter, that there are some memories and emotions that I’ve written about that no longer possess the same iron-clad hold on me. As if the act of sending them to my dozen or so friends has excised them from my ledger.

This newsletter has followed me through Houston, New York City, Paris, and DC, in a year of many changes. I wonder what this past year will look like in the rearview mirror, and I worry about forgetting. But then again, there will always be those aching things which may be better consigned to oblivion. So as we end the year, I want to thank you for reading.

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Exactly what it says on the tin, this is the memoir of Nabokov. Not only does he relay the happenings of his life, he contemplates upon the strengths and weakness of remembrance. He explicitly addresses how, by splitting his childhood governess into various caricatures across his stories, the genuine memory of her has distorted and faded. Through concrete remembrance, we relinquish the potency of our memories. Through repetition, the veracity of our recollections evolves.

Happy holidays and a drunken new year’s eve to everyone.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie