There is a smell I don’t smell anymore since moving to New York, and I miss it.
It was the decades-old mahogany wood paneling of a foyer in a building at the school I used to work at. The “Retreat House” was the president’s home and student residence on the campus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that was used half a century ago by groups of Catholics enjoying spiritual retreats. The 117-acre property and its facilities, including Retreat House, were purchased by the current school’s trustees in 1969.
Whenever I walked into Retreat House, I smelled the entrance of my grandparents’ house in Warwick, Rhode Island. It was a “spitting-image” likeness, and I found myself relaxing as I walked into work-related events there, even if I dreaded the actual event, because that smell was so evocative. It was a smell that spoke of love around the corner, coming out of the library to the right, a wrist jangling with gold bracelets and a grandmother smile, a two-week summer vacation filled with swimming in pools, fishing for rainbow trout but letting Poppa do the work while Jim and I ate all the Dunkin Donuts we’d bought, and going to my grandfather’s chicken farm to feed and weigh them, and perhaps watch him shoot an egg-stealing rat with his .22.
Smells like that can’t be kept and stored for future enjoyment. They diminish and then fade – like the vocabulary of a foreign language you learn and forget – and only resurface when you least expect it. It is a gift of remembrance.
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Few people realize how important smells can be, but you’ve captured it beautifully. After my mother died, I opened a box of her clothes at her storage unit, and some of her sweaters had retained her smell. Tears stung my eyes and within moments I was clutching the sweaters and sobbing. I wanted to keep my mother’s smell forever.
Susan