Gasoline, orange blossoms, sun tan lotion, coffee, the ocean, the paws of my dog, a new book, puppy breath, baby hair, Vicks Inhalers, Captain Black tobacco when passing a person smoking a pipe, the skin of a sexy woman, steaks broiling, the after-smell of a soapy shower, hot laundry, bakeries, good whiskey, citrus candles, new car, sulfur.
Smells, cozy.
Dove men's body wash in the green and grey bottle. Coffee beans and grounds, the pungent aroma of a coffeehouse, the pages of a new book, fresh cut grass, firewood, country air, homemade bread cooking in the oven, grandmas red sauce, onion hands, plant soil, crayons, assortments of herbs, stinky holistic tinctures, ripe peaches, lavender bath bubbles, hot kettle corn and funnel cakes from the fairgrounds, my moms sweet skin.
Babies
I'm a single man, never married, but I love kids.
By kids I don't mean the little hooligan that trashes his bedroom in a complete strop, I mean babies, little newborns, and more precisely, I love the smell of them.
You know what I mean right? That baby smell that makes you go all gooey and then makes you start making 'coo coo' noises.
It's weird, but when I get that new baby waft my eyes mist up and I'm taken back to when my best friend and his wife had their first child and I posed for a photo, and she grabbed hold of my little finger and I melted.
Every time I smell that smell I well up. They're adorable.
Eau de Memory
The waft of coconut on the skin of the one in line for the water slide.
Round steak simmering in onion soup.
The strewn debris of a pink eraser's aftermath.
These are long ago smells that now feel more like tastes in my brain.
Are tastes just compressed smells, converted to take up less RAM, streamlining the idle background usage of our brains?
Or is this malfunction evidence that I never really lived these memories, and that they were uploaded by my manufacturers?
Pity the man who never makes peace with that possibility.
