follow your nose down memory lane

it’s true. scent may be the secret to travelling back in time. yesterday morning during my shower, i noticed that the new conditioner that i was using smelled a lot like my favorite green apple shampoo from my childhood. immediately, i had vivid recall of my longtime childhood home and the linen closet/supply cupboard right across the hall from the bathroom. the kind of memory that you feel in your body rather than just see pictures in your head. it’s like i was back in my kid body. a three-dimensional flashback. (or would that be fourth since it involved time?) could smell be the fifth dimension?

thinking of that closet always reminds me of the time that i couldn’t go to sleep and i was all bent out of shape about it and so i told my parents that i had a sore throat so that i could use the cloraseptic throat spray. i think they caught me playing with it with my sister one time too and yelled at me. i’m not sure why i liked it–it always made me jump when the spray hit my mouth (kind of like that awful “puff of air” eye test–ugh.) but maybe i liked the taste. or the weird numbing sensation. or maybe just the fact that it was a pump spray bottle.

i also remember taking forever to clean the bathroom because i always got distracted and did “commercials” in the mirror, comparing the glass cleaning properties of, say, windex vs. soft scrub. (“look at how streaky this product is! while this product leaves a clean, streak-free shine.”) did anyone else (besides me and my wacky sister) do this sort of thing?

someone should really look into this smell-travel theory. i mean, you couldn’t travel physically that way of course, but hey, they didn’t physically travel in the matrix and it felt pretty real to them!