Hi writers,
I've really been enjoying the memory-dwelling we've done in recent posts like "Write About Your First Job" and "Write About a Scar." But sometimes we don't go hunting for a memory;
instead it finds us, often through our sense of smell.
Smell is the sense most closely attached to memory. I could be thinking of just about anything, even something heavy -- work, life, death, a sitting U.S. president afflicted with a potentially debilitating virus -- but if you wave a baseball under my nose, I'll disappear into the outfields of my past.
What I want to know is, what kinds of smells make you disappear into the baseball fields of your past? To borrow from Swann's Way, what smells "remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind" you of something from long ago?
If nothing comes to mind, describe what you smell right now; or describe some of your favorite odors and the kinds of feelings, thoughts, and images they summon.
And in what ways, if any, do you use the sense of smell in your fiction? Your nonfiction?
