What Triggers Memories
I hear, smell and see various sights and sounds of the city when I take my walks. It is interesting where the mind instantly goes when you smell, see or hear a certain something. Walking down the busy street this morning towards downtown Long Beach, I pass by various people and several multifamily housing units. The range of perfumes, colognes and scents emanating from households is quite broad... and almost every scent, whether pleasant or near disgusting, somehow brings me a memory of a place, a person or a path from the past. The passing scents flood my mind with the images of faces, names and the instances of exact locations from places I've traversed in the past. Same thing happens when I travel by car or public transportation through some neighborhoods, but the memory is mostly triggered by what I see rather than what I smell or hear. I can't help but remember things which I experienced at certain places in time in any particular neighborhood. Sometimes I think "why didn't I take another street / route" when I begin to remember the same oddity or 'thing' that happened here, but by the time I am remembering, it is too late. Some of the memories are pleasant, some not so much. Some memories are simply surprising and cause me to recall a person or a place in time.
Every so often I smell the cologne my dad uses; Stetson. Immediately, memories from childhood come to mind; riding with him on the back of his motorcycle, or traveling with him in his pickup truck on an errand or to breakfast, or simply being around him while he worked on building his plane or as he complained about something.
This morning, I smelled a perfume followed by the immediate smell of a home and then followed by another perfume. My mind recoiled as it processed the memory connection with those scents. The smell of the home was quite profound and stuck out, for I've smelled that before in several other homes years ago. It was the smell of an untidy home, most likely having old flattened unkempt carpets with a mold issue between them and the worn out padding underneath. I couldn't tell if the three scents emanated from the same location, for the ocean breeze carried with it the smells of the various apartment buildings it blew by prior to arriving at my nostrils.
Ahead of me on my path this morning, there was a guy with a leaf blower doing his job. Instead of crossing the street, I waited for him to either finish or move far enough away from my path so I can pass without having to hold my breath for too long as I passed by or be engulfed by the debris he was blowing about. As I stood there underneath a tree, staying out of the bright and bold sunlight, I recognized the tree as the same type my grandparents had at their home ( red spiny flowers with skinny and separate green leaves on a tree with a trunk deep with ridges in its bark; a red bottle brush tree ). I heard the familiar sound of a hummingbird as it took a break near the top of the tree. I look up and catch a glimpse of it landing on an outlaying branch at the precise time it squeezes out a 'load.' I laughed to myself to have seen that exact moment of relief / release. Good thing I wasn't directly beneath it nor in the path of the breeze which could have carried its waste onto my white 'God Father' Shantung straw hat. The hummingbird reminds of my mom regularly putting out her hummingbird feeder and always taking the time to look for the source of that distinct sound when it would eventually show up. I do this too as my mom would, enjoying the momentary departure from the other distractions, enjoying this natural distraction and pleasant moment of memory.
What recent pleasant memories have been recalled and triggered when you went about your day?
Which scents do you yearn to catch a whiff of so you can experience that place and time once again, even for a brief moment?
Every so often I smell the cologne my dad uses; Stetson. Immediately, memories from childhood come to mind; riding with him on the back of his motorcycle, or traveling with him in his pickup truck on an errand or to breakfast, or simply being around him while he worked on building his plane or as he complained about something.
This morning, I smelled a perfume followed by the immediate smell of a home and then followed by another perfume. My mind recoiled as it processed the memory connection with those scents. The smell of the home was quite profound and stuck out, for I've smelled that before in several other homes years ago. It was the smell of an untidy home, most likely having old flattened unkempt carpets with a mold issue between them and the worn out padding underneath. I couldn't tell if the three scents emanated from the same location, for the ocean breeze carried with it the smells of the various apartment buildings it blew by prior to arriving at my nostrils.
Ahead of me on my path this morning, there was a guy with a leaf blower doing his job. Instead of crossing the street, I waited for him to either finish or move far enough away from my path so I can pass without having to hold my breath for too long as I passed by or be engulfed by the debris he was blowing about. As I stood there underneath a tree, staying out of the bright and bold sunlight, I recognized the tree as the same type my grandparents had at their home ( red spiny flowers with skinny and separate green leaves on a tree with a trunk deep with ridges in its bark; a red bottle brush tree ). I heard the familiar sound of a hummingbird as it took a break near the top of the tree. I look up and catch a glimpse of it landing on an outlaying branch at the precise time it squeezes out a 'load.' I laughed to myself to have seen that exact moment of relief / release. Good thing I wasn't directly beneath it nor in the path of the breeze which could have carried its waste onto my white 'God Father' Shantung straw hat. The hummingbird reminds of my mom regularly putting out her hummingbird feeder and always taking the time to look for the source of that distinct sound when it would eventually show up. I do this too as my mom would, enjoying the momentary departure from the other distractions, enjoying this natural distraction and pleasant moment of memory.
What recent pleasant memories have been recalled and triggered when you went about your day?
Which scents do you yearn to catch a whiff of so you can experience that place and time once again, even for a brief moment?
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