Old smells, that immeditately transport you back in time?

Manure!
2 blocks from my apartment in the middle of suburbia is the last area farm.
an oasis of sorts called Marymeade Farm. It once had been 1,300 acres of farmland but is now down to 16 acres of pasture smack dab in the middle of Urban Sprawl. Hopefully the family will continue with it and not sell to developers. Probably inevitable though

Just Something about the sweet scent of hay and manure! LOL! Takes me back to being a kid when I grew up in a tiny village in upstate NY where I was surrounded by countless dairy farms so its nice to have a small slice of rural here in the middle of town to give me a small bit of escape. I find it relaxing and therapeutic.

THeres' a ceerrtain smell - don't know if it's a perfume or a room scent - that immediately transports me to my grandmother's house that she lived in from before I was born until 1992. Soon as I catch it, Im' back in that house. Can see it all very clearly.

Just yesterday morning, out walking the dog early, the smell of the damp around the trees and grass in our block's grounds took me right back to the grounds of Kilkerran caravan site in Ayrshire, Scotland - early nineteen eighties, we spent many holidays there, running in the forest, building dens, climbing trees, damming the river... we used to dam the river at a specific point to redirect it, wait til the bed dried out, then we'd light a fire on our last night there, cook on it, and when we'd finished, knock down the dam and let it wash away the firepit.

In the lift, I caught a whiff of a cleaning product that flashed me right back to the cafeteria in Girvin Swimming baths - same part of Scotland, same era, having a snack after having been in swimming....

Pit coal fire and/or burning steel, takes me immediately back to the ship yard forge I spent plenty good times in.

Don't know why, but I picked up some sandalwood scented soap the other day in the supermarket, and the smell sent me right back to my childhood.

Dog POO. Been cleaning it up and stepping in it since I was a little kid. It has never changed in it's odor. Always the same.

Mountain pine foam bath is always great!!

Trenchfriend said:

Mountain pine foam bath is always great!!

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Back in my teenage years, there was a mens' cologne that was part of the English Leather brand. It was called "Timberline" and I always liked how it smelled on me. It was one that lasted for hours, as did English Leather. I liked both of these and British Sterling the best. There was an attempt to recreate these in later years but all never reached the same degree of essence as far as I was concerned.

Wet Hookers

As one of The New Kids On The Block, I didn't know a thing. The Union was weak. In order for the current employees and retired members to preserve their existing level of pay and benefits, they agreed to an immediate freeze on hiring, and if anyone retired after the end of the fiscal year, they would retire with a downgraded benefits package. As everyone with enough seniority retired so that they can keep full benefits, there was a shortage of manpower as nobody was being hired to replace them. The handful of new guys like me, who got hired just before the hiring freeze, were left without enough training supervisors to teach us what to do.

Since I was too dumb to be trusted to work alone, and it was so busy that there was nobody who could be taken out of service to ride along with me.......the bosses decided that I should work The Wagon. A job where I learned nothing, but was simple enough that I couldn't mess it up. Just sit around in the lobby, until they call for you. Whenever patrol or investigations took somebody into custody, they could call for a wagon; if the person in custody was in such an unpleasant condition that you wouldn't want him or her in your car. I went to the scene of the arrest in a van, and transported the prisoner back to a holding cell. If that person should urinate, defecate, or vomit, I had to clean it up. Drunks. Bums. And wet hookers.

On a rainy day, the hookers are still out on the street. They get wet. The combination of an unbathed prostitute, wet dirty clothes, wet hair, and some sort of cheap scent that only hookers use. There is no way to describe in polite company, the source of all of those odors which combine to make hookers smell that way. "Wet Hooker" is not a part of anyone's vernacular, unless they've driven a transport van, or picked up a hooker in their own car.

Amy Jeanne said:

I remember learning in my psychology class that smell is the one sense that is most connected to memory.

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I was out "Club Hopping". A few of my friends and I would ride our motorcycles to different nightclubs, go in for a drink, then off to the next club. Sometimes we would meet girls who would hop on the back of a bike, and come along. I never had that happen, because my bike is a 1 seater. A solo saddle.

So as the other guys would ask girls to dance, I would just lean against the end of the bar and watch. Plus, I'm incredibly shy, and picking up random girls was not a skill that I had. I lacked the sophistication and confidence to just walk up to a girl I don't know, take her by the hand, and lead her onto the dance floor. The only girl I ever talked to, in any bar, would be a waitress or bartender, and I only said, "Bushmills, 3 cubes of ice".

At 3 AM, I found myself not wanting to go home yet, so I rode my bike to a 24 hour gym. Shower, and lay down in the sauna. At this hour of the night, there's nobody else there, so I stretch out like a transient on a park bench. Let the heat relax my body as I sober up a little more.

"It's all BS. Ice cubes are different sizes."

What? I opened my eyes. There was a girl. A bartender from on of the nightclubs. "Sorry, I didn't recognize you in the towel."

"The way you order your drink. With 3 ice cubes. It makes no sense. Ice cubes come in different sizes."

She said that it was her routine to relax in the sauna after bartending shifts. Apparently, her dad and my uncle knew each other from being in The Association. We never met. She's 3 years older than me. Growing up, she knew of me, because her dad would always tell her to stay away from the group of guys I hung with. He actually referred to me as So&So's no good son. It had to do with that time my picture was in the newspaper. But that scandal is another story.

"So with Covid, did you get vaccinated?"

It turns out that she got her shots in January. Piqued my curiosity. As bartenders were not on the priority list to get 1st shots. I'm classified as an essential worker, and my shots were in February. I wonder what she wasn't telling me. She asked if I still lived in The Neighborhood. It turns out she took over her grandmother's old apartment, just blocks away from me.

"Since you've been coming to The Club, and you never tried to hit on me. You don't even remember me from when we were kids. It's safe to assume that you don't have 'the hots' for me. Want to come over? I can heat up some leftovers. There's still some duck in the fridge. It's almost like catching up with an old friend, only we were never really friends."

Weird. All these years. Plenty of mutual acquaintances. I never noticed her, and she was there the whole time. Yet, it felt like she knew me. There was something between a heavy fog and a light rain. My leather and jeans were wet. The lobby attendant who let me into her building gave me a little "side eye" when I said which tenant I was going to visit.

She was in lingerie. The naughty kind, that makes me blush, stare down at the floor, and shuffle my feet. It put a stutter into my mumbled hello. Is this how it goes? Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I'm not the kind of boy who gets lucky with girls. Do girls really just casually lounge around in Japanese pornography costumes?

"Take off those wet clothes. You're going to stink like a 'wet hooker'. Are you afraid of me seeing you in your underwear? I just saw you naked in the sauna. And why were you naked? You know you're suppose to be covered in a towel when you go into the gym sauna. Don't make too much noise. You might wake up my girlfriend."

Then it hit me. The aroma of bread baking. Somehow, I knew that she was baking bread, the same way I baked it. The same way my dad and uncles taught me to bake bread when I was a kid going camping. The same bread I baked for a Juarez bar girl, the summer I spent hiding in a brothel in Mexico. Who is this girl? Why does she know me so well? How does she know how to bake the same bread? Why did she say "wet hooker"? She said it. Wet Hooker. Nobody says 'wet hooker', except for cops.

......and elsewhere in my world, when it comes to scents evoking a memory.....not that I've sniffed every stripper across the land.....but there must be a secret training center that teaches strippers to wear the same perfume, and body glitter