When I was walking past the Chichester Country Store booth at the Winter Farmers' Market at Cole Gardens, I sensed an aroma that activated a scene from a delightful moment in my childhood. The smell of the apple cider doughnuts rolled back the layer of years, uncovering a memory that had been dormant for decades.
This should not have surprised me. Scientific research confirms that our sense of smell by way of the olfactory nerve is handled by the same part of the brain that handles emotions and memory. What we smell becomes associated with the memory of the good or bad experience in which it occurred, along with a strong emotional attachment.
As Natalie Angier wrote in a New York Times article, “The nose is an emotional time machine. The mysterious power of smell is important in love, friendship and food. Our olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain where emotions are born and memories are stored. That is why smells, feelings and memories become so intimately entangled.”
In Smell and Memory, Shigeyiki Ito wrote, “When you smell a certain scent it feels as though you slipped back in time and that you are actually at that scene again. Smells can instantly trigger memories of events, places and people.”
The ability to smell plays a powerful role in nature. Salmon return across hundreds of miles in the ocean, drawn by the odor of the stream where they were hatched many years prior. Horses are credited with being able to smell water from a great distance on the prairie. Of all the dogs, bloodhounds have the keenest sense of smell and can follow a scent trail days old; but the silver-tip grizzly has a sense of smell several times stronger than the bloodhound and can detect the smell of food from several miles away. Also, smell has a vital function in the bonding of a mother with her newborn.
The memory that surfaced from the fragrance of those apple cider doughnuts was crystal clear. One fall day when I was a child, my Aunt Evelyn had come from her farm to visit us, and she took us outdoors for a picnic. Under a large tree, we ate our lunch, including the apple cider doughnuts she had made. I still remember the wind blowing through my hair and the sound of swaying tree branches over head, dropping colorful leaves that swirled around us. And I will never forget how delicious was the taste of the cinnamony, crisp on the edges, melt-in-your-mouth, apple cider doughnuts, still warm from the kitchen's wood burning stove.
My wife can smell better than I do. She can catch a whiff of the beans burning in the pan while I am blissfully unaware that my dinner is turning charcoal-black. But what I do smell opens the floodgate of nostalgia, like the aroma of apple cider doughnuts which takes me back to that outdoor picnic one beautiful autumn day in my childhood.
