Nothing is more memorable than a smell

Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.  ~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses


Yesterday, I chopped garlic and onions in my kitchen while ground beef sizzled on the stove and after a deep breath, I was 12 or 13 in my mother's kitchen talking with my stepfather. When I walk past the smokers on campus, it is, at once, my father (again I am 12 or 13 or so - he quit smoking when I was 14) and my college years.  Lightning (yes, it has a smell, which science has taught me is ozone) is my wedding day.  Pabst Blue Ribbon and cooked cabbage (because that's a combo you encounter often!) is my grandmother - but only with an entire Thanksgiving dinner behind it. Sawdust is my father again.  Baby powder is fairly meaningless, but lavender shampoo and tea tree oil is my children's infancy. 


I leaned over yesterday and sniffed the most sniffable part of my youngests's head and I realized that she is on the precipice of toddlerhood.  To be clear, she's only 9 months old but she's losing her baby smell.  You know the smell. I know the smell, though there's no way to describe it except "the exact smell of every baby when they lay their head on your chest and you sniff the crown of their head."


But at some point between baby and toddler and kid, my kids seem to cast off the baby smell for the smell of sunshine and play, sunscreen and shampoo, and, strangely, at night when they are in their beds, Chinese food. Yesterday when I sniffed Elsa's head, I smelled sunshine and Chinese food masking out the undertones of baby. 


She's growing and it is truly bittersweet.  


I am delighted to watch her bloom - as I watch the other two bloom - but I remain saddened that soon the baby smell in this household will be a memory evoked only by sniffing the heads of other people's children and saying "Do you smell that?  Do you?  It's intoxicating.  It's baby."