Smells, memories

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I lived for a year in very small farm in the hills of the Appennins. I was ten years old and, for several months, from August to October perhaps, I was alone with the family of the farmer and perhaps an aunt of mine. I say perhaps because I don’t remember any of my family living there at that time. Perhaps this aunt was in the house where I lived and took care of me for meals and for my baths, which were taken in a wooden tub, my aunt rubbing me, of course naked and with some shame on my part. There was no running water. It was the war and later all sorts of troops begun to arrive, requisitioning this and that (cattle and men) and organizing some artillery in the vicinity. But this happened later. At first it was quiet, except for the butchering of some animal, which, when it happened, upset me very much. Mostly I run around in the hilly fields and discovered flowers, trees, bushes and plants that I had never seen in the city. There were olive trees, fig, peach, cherry trees, vineyards and the corn and the mais fields. There was also a little wood belonging to the farm. It was all very small, but it all looked grandiose to me at that time. There was a big (so it seemed to me) cherry tree on the limit of the orchard, where I sat eating cherries. Some tomatoes were near and I breathed the particular aroma of the tomatoes leaves. I was happy there and each time I find some fragment of leaf attached to a tomato I rub it to snuff the odor. I relive that universe, now totally eaten up by other forms of farming, much much less attractive. Is it the real thing that I smell? But anyhow I smell it with pleasure.
There was also a straw-stack near the house. It was somehow sliced in the middle by the farmers; I climbed with some ladder in one of the cavities and there I lied, totally ignored by anybody and looking at the blue sky in perfect plenitude of being. Do such moments still exist somewhere, for someone? I like to think they do, I know they do.

The smell of Vicks Vaporub reminds me of my days off school with the cold in the security of my warm bed.

Smells, tastes. Smells are much more evocative than tastes, no matter that a French writer wrote some 2000 pages starting from a taste.
Getting out in the morning in a French city (Avignon) I was inundated by the smells of croissants coming from a boulangerie. I bought three and ate them on the spot. But there are more enticing smells not soliciting gluttony. Feminine odors of course, not so much artificial perfumes, as the smell of sweat and of the hair. Burned wood of pine tree in a sea resort. Even some smells that should be considerend repelling, like that of fried fish again in some port (not being particularly hungry: am I to be considered a pervert?). This has something to do with an aunt of mine I went to visit in the summer. She was the nicest member of my extended family. But there are many others, I will think it up and try to submit a list, though incomplete. Mostly only finding them by chance you recollect them. As for tastes I have no doubt: rasberries drive me mad. When the season comes I buy and eat tons of them. They remember me of walks in the mountains in summer when I was a child.

Two years ago they awarded the Nobel of medicine to Buck and Axel, two Amrican reasarchers in human smell. They assure us that we can distinguish some 10.000 different odors. If someone is incredule I quote the motivation for the prize: "The sense of smell long remained (before them) the most enigmatic of our senses. The basic principles for recognizing and remembering about 10,000 different odors were not understood before them" Given that a dog’s nose is 100 times more powerful, you can understand why they go on snuffing here and there all the time. They recall mates, preys, foods and whatoever else. An entire universe recapitulated in smells.

I'm very sensitive to smells. I can catch just a faint scent at a random time during the day and be instantly transported back to another time. But I find all kinds of minute things can suddenly trigger a flood of memory - some miniscule object, a scent, a sound, just the way the light shines off of something - then I'll just sit there frozen and transfixed for a while going over it in my head.

I'm quite sensitive to smell. Smells bring back memories or pictures and can even make me think of certain people. In a certain time, or certain season, in a certain location.