Published: March 04, 2009 09:35 pm         

Ahhh . . . the sweet smell of nostalgia

My grandma could make the most amazing sounds with a piece of Dentyne gum. I would sneak little side-long peeks at her to see if I could detect how she made those mysterious little popping and cracking noises. It was probably not magic so much as the gum’s movement around her dental bridge, but still I loved the cinnamon-y smell that lived in her purse from the pack she always kept tucked away. Dentyne gum, just a tiny rectangular stick made up of gum base, sorbitol, glycerine, artificial flavorings, red #40 and BHT to maintain freshness. It can bring her back to me in an instant.

Smell is a powerful sense because it is so closely linked with our emotions. Apparently the olfactory system keeps in close touch with the limbic system which contains the amygdale and hippocampus parts closely associated with memory and emotion. (I’m just going to take Dr. Alan Hirsch’s word for it here since he actually heads up “The Smell and Taste Research Foundation!”) He calls this phenomena “olfactory evoked recall.”

According to Dr. Hirsch’s studies, the events evoked by nostalgic smells are not as important as the emotions they recall. Our adult minds tend to reshape these memories, making us see them through rose-tinted glasses. A nostalgic smell enables us to re-visit a time associated with childhood — free from adult responsibilities and anxieties, now lost to us forever.

Cakes and baking bread made up the largest category of nostalgic smells recalled by the folks being tested at the “Smell and Taste Research Center,” followed closely by bacon and coffee. The more mature test subjects recalled smells more associated with nature than people born in later decades. Nothing like the smell of horse manure to conjure up memories of riding to town in a horse-drawn wagon! (Do you suppose Generation X gets a childhood shout out from freshly unwrapped Twinkies and a sprinkle of bacon bits?)

As usual, as with so many, many things, the sense of smell is more acute in women. So, I decided to ask a bunch of my female co-workers, and one of our four men, just what smells bring it all back to them. Their answers were a sweet, aromatic trip down memory lane.

Just like Dr. Hirsch’s study, the smell of freshly baked cakes and cookies was high on the list. Lisa Brumfield, our librarian, named the pies her grandmother used to bake to suit each grandchild’s taste, and the smell of fabric in Hancock’s when shopping with her mother. Coffee was a huge favorite along with pot roast, fried chicken and a certain cake Charles Austin’s mother used to make. Cotton candy does it for the boss (Bazooka makes a cotton candy flavored bubblegum that isn’t half bad. I even brought her some because I’m something of a kiss-up) and we couldn’t call ourselves a school if we didn’t like the smell of crayons and Play-doh in the morning!

The opinions of two male outsiders were allowed in — Pam Swinnea’s husband, Bill, said it’s the smell of a cold front coming in. My husband said it’s whatever that stuff is they put in electric toy train engines to make “smoke.” A scent he must be keeping in his mind since I don’t believe he’s actually smelled that since about 1957!

Laundry fresh off the line (anybody still hang stuff outside?), lilacs growing under open bedroom windows, Christmas tree lots, popcorn, newborn babies, cut grass on a warm summer evening, ivory soap, wooden matches just struck — all powerful memory evokes to my friends. Some, shall we say, alternate choices, cropped up in the form of Noxema skin cream, Vicks vaporub, Pledge furniture polish, Coppertone suntan lotion, dry erase markers and the old ditto machine smell. To each his own, I say.

As for me, besides the Dentyne, it’s a certain shampoo that smells like rain on the Arizona desert. I love smoke from a campfire, White Shoulders perfume, horses and the best smell of all — one I had totally forgotten that suddenly pops up and takes me back to a sweeter, more innocent time — like that toxic burning plastic odor that smells a lot like my little brother’s Vac-u-form set on Christmas morning, 1963!

Life comes at you fast, so take time to smell the roses ... and freshly baked bread, newborn babies, a change of weather, and just maybe for you, too, one of those tiny aromatic sticks of Dentyne gum from Grandma’s purse!



Peck, a local mother and grandmother who works in Enid Public Schools, can be reached at peckaroonie@yahoo.com