So, memories are fascinating.
Yesterday, as I was sitting down in math class, I smelled a certain classroomy smell and I immediately went back to my 7th grade English class, taught by the aptly named Ms. Schreiber. It was amazing how quickly it happened, especially considering that I never thought her classroom smelled much like anything.
However, an even MORE powerful scent memory came this morning as I was just arriving for dance class, after having had a lovely and amusing dialog with myself about the many ways in which one can describe the way one gets from place to place (i.e. - walking, trotting, flouncing, flitting, galumphing, slouching, stumbling, sidling, scooting, high-tailing, etc.). I went into the locker room and suddenly, I smelled what must've been someone's soap or something, and it was the EXACT scent of the tiny bars of white soap that my host sister and I used weekly to scrub all the socks while I was in Thailand. The two of us would sit on overturned washing tubs or on nothing at all, crouching over the ground with a slab of smooth rock (looked like marble, but I'm not sure) and we'd hold a sodden sock down with one hand and run the soap over it (plusieurs fois), turning it to make sure that we got all of the sides before it got dumped into the rinsing bucket. This was every Saturday afternoon, the morning after I routinely stayed up through the entire night with a fellow exchange student while at a music camp at my school. Usually, Saturdays, I would come home and hope that my host mom had forgotten about laundry --- haha. Then, sleep in my eyes and thinking only of my nap later, my sister and I would crouch over those damn socks, getting cramps in our backs and get the job done.
Even when I think about now, I start to feel the slight breeze and the warm, humid air. I miss that life.
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This is one of my favorite posts so far. I love memory-- especially smell memory. The other day I was walking back from the tea shop and passed someone who was wearing Chanel No. 5, and immediately I was transported back to being four years old, Elise a one-year-old and Jesse six, in my yellow footie pajamas, clutching the Dr. Seuss Anthology to my tiny chest as my mother gave me a big hug and kiss as she was about to go out on a date with my father. Her smell enveloped me with her hug, and as Chanel No. 5 was her "going out" perfume, now whenever I smell it I can almost feel her holding me close, telling me that she loved me and she would be back before I knew it to read me a story.
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