She bought some alcohol for me from Italy - it wasn't a gift, it's a 1 liter bottle of pure (95%, ideal for perfumery) alcohol that independent perfumers are obliged to smuggle around with, because selling and buying pure alcohol is highly restricted in France.
She invited me over to her place to take it with me after spending a nice lunchtime on a terrace catching up with each others on-going projects.
We walked up to her door in the dark building that for some reason smelled like tomato leaf and not like amber or patchouli as any normal old dark building would smell like. We entered the small artsy apartment she rents. She showed me around and she invited me to the living room for a drink. There it hit me.
This time again, the memories were coming faster than my brain trying consciously make notes of the present olfactory notes.
I was young again, around 5, a few years after my grandfather died. We - My mum and a few cousin of mine - spent a few weeks in the summertime at my grandmother's house in a small village, "behind the back of God".
I was at my grandmother's kitchen.
I could clearly smell the dust on the shelf for glasses which were kept for guests only. I smelled the dark and bitter cacao powder in its soon-to-be rusty metallic container. I smelled the cheap light green paint and its uneven layers on the old month-eaten wood cupboard, where the dinner service was stored. I smelled these as if I was at grandmother's kitchen. Exactly the same proportions. Beautifully dosed. Round and alive.
Bringing me back all the carefreeness and greediness of my childhood in a blink of an nose.
How come a fortunate and rather rare alignment of some random fragrant molecules are powerful enough to take me back to a place so quickly, diffusing so many visual memories and emotions?
I never thought of that smell in the last 25 years! - In fact, I don't think I ever consciously thought of that smell at all...
I am not sure what it was. And it was only passing by lazily, and disappeared in a few minutes later. I will probably never really understand these flashbacks, but in this period of anxiety, extreme stress as well as creative/emotional roller - coasters; I don't think there could have been any scent more nurturing and cocooning to me.
Where is ScentTrek when I really need it?!
