By Chuck Woodbury
ROADSIDE JOURNAL
I was organizing some boxes the other day when I came across my father’s hairbrush. My father died in 2008. When packing up his stuff back then, I placed the brush in an air-tight Ziploc bag (and put that bag inside another bag) and stored it with other items.
The brush has many short bristles, and it picked up a lot of hair. Every so often a brush like that needs to be cleaned. My father’s had not been cleaned in a long time, and contained hundreds of his hairs.
What a surprise it was when I opened that Ziploc bag! It was like my father had walked right into the room: I could smell him! I put my nose even closer to the bag and the smell was stronger. It wasn’t a good smell or a bad smell. It was just the way my dad smelled.
If I closed my eyes, my father was there! It was unnerving. It made me sad, because all of a sudden the memory of him was overpowering: I experienced the same emptiness I occasionally feel since he died.
I have kept that Ziploc bag handy, and many years on his birthday I open it for about 15 seconds. With my eyes closed, I sniff. And ever-so-briefly my father is with me again. It’s wonderful.
AFTER THINKING ABOUT THIS, I realized that smell is the one sense we can’t actually imagine at will. I mean, if I close my eyes I can almost see my father’s face. If I concentrate I can hear his voice. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot remember what he smelled like.
My mother, who died shortly after my father, wore the same perfume every day. When I came into a room, if she were there I would know it before I saw her. But if I try to remember the smell of that perfume, I cannot. Yet, if someone were to walk into a room today wearing it, I would immediately recall my mother.
I don’t believe that anyone can, at will, imagine a smell of the past. I believe you must actually smell it. I don’t even recall a dream that involved smell.
What do you think?
This story was first posted in 2017, but was updated in October 2023.
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Beautiful, tear producing. Oh to have a memory like that. Savor it.
Yes, I agree, savor it.
I have a box containing scarves my mother wore….when I open it I can smell her. It’s comforting because I still miss her so. Now I just wish I’d captured her voice.
When our daughter in law passed away at age 27, it was a real heartbreak for our son and the whole family. One of the things his church friends did was to come to the house and wash all of her clothes everything she wore. When our son found out his comment was “All the smells of her are gone.” That upset him for quite a while. So it is not a bad idea to put something in a ziplock bag!!
2 memories about smell- I once worked in a boatshop, and one day we cut into a piece of [lywood. The smell of the sawdust took me back to my childhood when my dad had made a table for our Lionel trains – it was a remarkable leap back in time.
The other was a little less pleasant. Many weeks after our grandmother died, my brother & I went to clear out her apartment. When I opened her closet door, the odor of stale cigarette smoke was very evident. She had smoked for years, and her clothes were saturated with the smell of tobacco smoke those many weeks later.
I still have my mother’s hair net from 1982 tucked away in an envelope. Every now and then, I open the envelope, and ever so briefly, she is standing beside me.
Yes, the smell of a passed loved one can stay on a hat, old sweatshirt even the hair brush for a long time. I hug my husbands raggedy hat all the time because I can still smell him. It’s priceless……….
Hobby Lobby sells a candle called Grandpa’s Chair that my daughters and I say it reminds them of their grandpa/my dad. I walk into our storage and it reminds me of my grandmother.
Wow. You hit the nail on the head. My mom passed in 2011. I still have many of her belongings, some valuable, some not. I have a plastic container of her wedding rings and other jewelry she wore when she passed. When opened, the smell of her perfume definitely takes me back.
Lucky guy. We have nothing from either sets of parents.
I have a small wood cabinet my grandfather made for my grandmother, all by hand as there were no power tools for him. My Dad suggested I did not want “that ugly thing” in my living room. Rather, I love it because the smell is of my grandparents home, so many years ago. How surprised I was to walk into a furniture store and find matching furniture made today! At any rate, it holds my trinkets from my parents time in Europe, happy memories with a smell from the past.
I don’t from my parents and glad I don’t. But my oldest son killed in a head on car accident wore a fresh grass cut smelling cologne. I have a few times since smelled it while out in public. It makes me stop and look around. A weird unnerving sense of his being present.
Personally, I can remember extremely “important” smells for at least several years. The ether smell when I had my tonsils out at 5 years old. There are a couple of others. But like everything that isn’t burned into my memory it faded over time. If I did indeed get a whiff of that or my mother’s perfume (as you did) it’ll come back. Smell be one of the strongest triggers of memory.
I lost my mother in 1985, I don’t have anything with her scent, but I have an old slotted spoon that my wife and I use everyday. One time while visiting my aunt and uncle, my aunt was making Bisquick biscuits. Now that odor brought back memories of mom right away.
Thankyou for sharing your memories and story.
My experience was different. When I was 18, I went to Ohio State as a freshman and lived in a dorm. I had lipstick I loved, “California Girl”. Years later in my 30’s I found this little pink tube of lipstick that had followed me through several moves, marriage, career, in a dresser drawer. On a whim, I put the lipstick on. The smell and taste transported me back to the dorm, standing at the mirror in that dorm room! For several seconds I was 18 years old, I literally had the emotions of my 18 year old self!! I can’t explain how amazing this was. I put the lipstick away, and tried it again a few months later, but could not duplicate this experience.
My wife kept my mother’s purse intact, occasionally we open it and it takes us back. My wife loved my mother very much. My father was from a generation that used hair oil, when he passed I went to his medicine cabinet and took his hair oil, I should have a lifetime of smells from that bottle.
I think that you are right, Chuck. On certain, unpredictable days, as soon as I venture outside, I am transported to a cross-country course, or a track on which I raced at least 40 years ago. I once spent a week in the Willamette Valley with a former teammate, running all sorts of places and every once in a great while, I detect a smell that transports my mind to that week, to one of those locations we were at in August 1981.