Sense Memories, by Susan Currie

Carnations are the fragrance of funerals. Standing next to my father’s coffin as a child, the scent of flower stands filled with carnations overwhelmed me. Carnation olfactory hallucinations have followed me ever since — to school, walking in the woods, driving, or even just upon waking in the morning stretching to meet the new day. For years, I was convinced it was my father come back to check on me.

“Eau de New Baby Doll” is the 1950s smell of . . . well . . . a new baby doll. It’s the plastic. Sometimes, even now, a new shower curtain liner takes me back to unwrapping the cellophane on the big box holding a new baby doll. In retrospect, it was quite scary with eyes that never closed.

In the 1970s there was the overwhelming and suffocating experience of patchouli oil, on everyone, everywhere. An Alice Cooper concert was the crowning moment of a communal bath of patchouli. But there is also the memory of sandalwood, the fragrance of thousands of Egyptian princesses mingled with warm oak, earthy and magical.

In the spring, I miss the intoxicating scents of a southern spring night. Flowers give off the color of their perfumes: wisteria deeply purple; magnolias white, sometimes with faint pink and green at the center; daffodils cheerfully yellow; and even violets with their elusive, easy to miss scent. The deepest is the narcissus, heavy with, at first, joy, then at a certain moment, the rot of regret. “Starry Narcissus, starry Narcissus,” my mother liked to sing under her breath as she took care to track the exact moment the flower’s fragrance tipped from beautiful to decay.

The teenage perfume I loved most was one called “Tigress” because it smelled like new paper. There is the "Jovan White Musk" Chris wore when we first dated. Later, I fretted that the perfumes we wore defined our personalities: “White Linen” and “Escape” for her and later “Happy,” while I wore dark, more foreboding-sounding scents like “Eternity” and “Chance.”

We each keep the last bottles of perfume our mothers owned: Estee Lauder’s “Youth Dew” from Antoinette, Chris’s mom, and Lanvin’s “Arpege” from my mother. Perhaps once a year, we pull out these bottles, close our eyes, breathe the scents in deeply and remember our mothers as they sprayed a mist and stepped into it for a lighter effect.

Lessons from my mother about scent:  Only at night, always a light mist that one steps into so that passing through a room, a faint fragrance is left trailing behind like a pleasant memory.


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Twenty-Four Hours of Five Senses: November 7, 2018

In the last twenty-four hours in our house, there was the smell of freshly baked oatmeal bread, the odor of turned earth as the gardens were stripped and cleaned for the winter, the wet dog running happily through the house, the fragrance of roasted vegetables for soup.

There was the feel of the smooth, old wooden banister while going upstairs, the slipperiness of throw rugs, the unpleasantness of stepping into an invisible puddle of water in sock feet.

There was the sound of shuffling through leaves on the path while on a walk, the silence ringing in my ears while in the house alone.

There was the contrast in the sky between dark blue-black and grey storm clouds and wispy, faint pink cirrus clouds just under them; the sudden clarity and brightness of a few stars popping out as clouds passed overhead. The light from a low plane on ascent, looking like a car gone mad.

We can’t give up the taste of the leftover Halloween candy — “teenage girl candy” — Starburst, tootsie rolls, and strongly flavored fruit chews that make our jaws ache with the sweetness.