The scent of home
I recently stumbled upon an interview with a girl who had lost her sense of smell after a car accident. When asked which scent she missed most, she surprisingly didn’t answer with ‘the smell of coffee’, or ‘the smell of grass’, but with ‘the smell of home’. She missed the familiar smell that welcomes you when you get back from vacation, the smell that lets you know you are home again. It had taken her a long time before she was able to feel at home again.
Not only do we recognize food by our sense of smell for example, we also identify places and people depending on how they smell. Our brain processes smells in the area where it also processes emotions and memories. Whenever your brain detects a new smell, it links it to that particular moment – to that time, to that place, to that person – and saves it. Whenever the scent is encountered again, especially after a long time, you associate it with a memory, with the emotions you felt there and then. Naturally, most scents are stored early on in life, which is why the smell of home is one of our first olfactory memories.
My house doesn’t smell that pleasant. Something happened to our neighbors’ plumbing years ago, before we moved in. It heavily affected the way our house smells – a thick, moist and musty smell has settled into our staircase, seeped into our clothes and occasionally rises up from our drains, giving our apartment a permanent undertone. We try to cover it up as much as possible by filling our house with an overload of freshly baked goods, loads of ground coffee beans and our favorite scented candles. By the end of the day however, these scents are just fleeting.
I discovered it is best to fill our home up with delightful memories, deep emotions and our favorite people, so that whenever I open my suitcase anywhere else and the smell of home fills my nostrils, no matter how much I dislike it, it is linked to nothing but loveliness. Home away from home.