Readers share the smells of their lives
Last week’s column got one of the strongest responses from readers of anything that has ever appeared in this publication. Sorry, I should be more specific. Anything ever published in this publication under my byline.
It was about smells.
The premise was — if you could smell only two smells for the rest of your life, what would those two smells be? It’s certainly not a question worthy of these momentous times in our history yet, still, it makes a person think.
I immediately leapt at coffee and it turns out many readers agree. Coffee is, hands down, the closest to a consensus as there is in this hypothetical draft of an eternal scent duo.
After that, you provided a thoughtful and at times heartfelt list of favourite smells.
Food is popular and that shouldn’t be surprising. Aside from coffee, more than one of you said you love the smell of homemade bread, right from the oven. I suggested bread in last week’s column but since we are not bakers, my mind immediately turned not to bread hot from the oven but bread hot from the toaster.
That’s kind of sad, really. Another reader said apple pie is definitely second to coffee — and it was top of mind for her because her young grandson just recently asked her, “Grandma, will you make me an apple pie — and not keto?”
Some people opted for more, I don’t know, poetic smells. Rain on a hot summer day and snow on Christmas Eve. Freshly cut grass was a popular choice along with other reminders of nature’s gifts — such as lilacs in bloom.
One reader offered a delightful compromise of poetic and functional. Pointing out the difficulty of choosing because scent can be so strongly tied to emotion and memories, she wrestled her picks down to two things that could capture such complexity.
One is late spring blossoms and the freshness wafting in the air. It’s a description not so much of a singular smell but of an all-encompassing record of a moment in time that no other of our senses could capture so clearly.
The other is garlic sautéing in butter.
And I love everything about this response. Except it gets better. She also offers runners up. Campfires — a great choice that makes me think of a lifetime of memories with friends and family gathered in so many places and at so many different stages of our lives, each campfire moment separate yet in magical ways connected by the warmth the light and the smell of those dancing flames.
The other runner up is bacon frying. Also a great choice that makes me think, I really like bacon.
Maybe a little surprising is the smells we haven’t acknowledged.
No one mentioned a couple of school-day throwbacks. Magic markers! No one said magic markers. I mean, sure they were dangerous little tubes of toxic solvents that could cause intoxication but they didn’t smell half bad.
On the foul end of the spectrum, or smelltrum, and this might be way too obscure a reference, but every year we did a little Red Cross water safety course and at the end we got an iron-on decal featuring the mascot, Walter Safety, and I remember very well that for some reason that iron-on smelled just like vomit.
We would get our Walter Safety iron-ons and immediately stick our nose on them and recoil, “Ew.” Then we’d do it again and again. If I smelled that smell today, I would instantly feel like I’m in Grade 4.
Another smell of childhood for me is the smell of that little stick of gum that came in a pack of hockey cards. The gum itself was terrible. It was a stick of cardboard that lost its flavour in two chews. But the smell was incredible and it got right into the hockey cards so I would enjoy it every time I went back to admire and organize my collection.
Drakkar Noir was on no one’s list. There was a time that I thought Drakkar Noir was the finest smell in the universe and that the only thing better than the smell of a little Drakkar Noir was the smell of a lot of Drakkar Noir.