The Persistent Nose of Memory

This is a piece I had published in PineStraw Magazine. So here it is, with a few of my own edits:

Scent: One of the most producing of senses, it embodies the world of memory, the forgotten love notes and arguments, the precious moments we chose to remember, the ones we chose not to. Every so often a scent is so overwhelming that it feels as if the world has shifted and you are experiencing an elapsed moment of time—a rare gem of history. And it’s so surprising, this shift, that it seems to light you from within and seems to heal you in ways that you never even knew needed healing.

Italy has a distinct scent: the garlic that settles into the fleshy fingertips of our hands, the smell of cold stone in a hushed chiesa, the musty air that hovers over a family run augriturismo, the sliced sweetness of a melon. The scents of Italy linger above our heads like the strings of a puppet show, waiting to draw the curtain and reveal a memory. In one fluid motion, our minds are filled with the aromas of Italy and flooded with reminiscences.

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On a recent trip to Todi, I was overwhelmed with a scent from my childhood. It began when I walked past an ancient gate, a gate that may once have been used to protect a small garden or foster a young love. The metallic makeup of the gate was enveloped in a lanky plant. Not having a background in botany, I couldn’t identify which plant encased the entrance. But despite my lack of botanical knowledge, I still took away a granule of insight from the plant. This granule of familiarity, this crumb of memory was produced by the scents of Italy.

The plant smelled like my father’s workshop. It is a complicated scent, a mixture of burnt leaves and sandalwood aftershave, of freshly laundered clothes and bold coffee. I remember watching my father haul a bag of mulch over his shoulder, bearing the weight against his body, the pungent scent of manure mixing with the brackish smell of sweat.

I can recall lying in the garden, this fragrant smell covering my body like a blanket. To simply pass the afternoons, drenched in this smell felt like heaven to me: watching the trees shift in the wind, the sky turning from pale to blue. We, my brother Jack and I, would while away the hours, re-enacting civil war battle scenes, dozing in the hammock, saturated in the scent of the workshop.

At this moment of recognition, I felt my eyes water: a familiar scent in Italy gave my weary foreigner heart a chance to rest. It soothed me to know that I was 4,000 miles away from home in Italy yet only mere seconds away in my memory.

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Someone wise once told me that there exists in the human heart, a great propensity to hope in tandem with a voracious desire for the times gone by. They claimed that as human beings, we are presented with an immense amount of longing—an insatiable appetite for days of the past, the yesteryears, the golden moments of flimsy photo albums. These moments recapture instances we’ve lost, figments of history. They are rivulets of memories rushing lazily through the course of a lifetime.

Do we ever truly lose sight of the past? We may try our best to forget, move on, attempting to let go of our previous history, but the problem with letting go of anything is that theory rarely matches reality --life isn't lived on paper. It's lived in the day-to-day world of personal memory and unexpected emotion. Like a closet full of things, its jumbled and untidy. Nothing is ever really forgotten, and even if you “let go” of everything, it will eventually find it’s way back to you. It seems to me that with the world constantly presenting us with smells and fragrances, the past is simply sitting in the piazza just around the corner.

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When I was a child, I used to think that Italy was God’s footprint. That like my father in the garden, with weeds intercepting his precious plants, he would get so angry he would stamp hard at the ground, angry dust circling his boots. I had figured that God was so fed up with Europe and their lackadaisical time system, their capricious artists, who tended to flee on the job, that he stamped his boot so forcefully on the European ground, thus creating Italy.

I used to imagine Leonardo da Vinci holding hands with Michelangelo, dancing through art galleries, singing praises to fellow artisans. I pictured heaping plates of pasta, spilling over cities, overtaking houses, like the pages of my favorite childhood book, Strega Nonna.

Fourteen years later, I’ve traversed many continents to be in Perugia, Italy, living in a large apartment for four months with the taste of last night’s wine still stinging my tongue. In my initial first few weeks here in Perugia, I had felt a little lost, a little weary of this country and it’s wonderful customs. The constant search for food other than Italian had started to grate on my nerves. The inconvenient transportation system that seems to only run when wanting to made me long for the simplicity and personal clutter of my own car.

My life at home has been so entwined with family and basic comforts, that it doesn’t seem all that shocking I had encountered the feared homesickness. But, as these past few months have worn on I feel as if I’ve found solace in the unanticipated uplifting moments of kindness or the granules of familiarity, the crumbs of memory that seem to sprout unexpectedly throughout this Umbrian hill city.

It is as if Italy has renewed my sense of the past—and for that I am hopeful. I am hopeful for those moments of pure nostalgia and pure reminiscence, because I know they will surface again. Italy is constantly inundating me with the fragrances of my life history, my own homemade powerpoint—the rich smell of espresso invokes the image of my father brewing coffee as we habitually watched the early morning news broadcast together. The sharp scent of gas, emitted from a Vespa summons a cool fall evening out on our boat, navigating the Maine Sea. The persistent culinary fragrances that drift through my neighborhood, escaping one window and floating into the next, remind me of my mother’s cooking; all of them soothing me.