Tag: smell

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Humphreys was a shingle building with a handwritten sign above its entrance—HUMPHREY’S BAKED GOODS & SANDWICHES. Even before I opened its screen door, the unmistakable smell of bread baking wafted outside. Is there any better smell on earth?

— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir (Gallery Books, May 6, 2025)

Notes:

  • NY Times Book Review: The Brash, Working-Class Londoner Who Redefined New York’s Restaurants
  • Wall Street Journal book excerpt: Keith McNally: “I Had No Chef, No Toilets and No Budget. But I Was Determined to Open Balthazar.”

Scents I am able to recall…

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i can bring back certain scents from memory

maybe you can too

yesterday in a hospital room i was explaining to mom that because of his septoplasty surgery three weeks earlier he has lost his sense of smell

but I was sitting eating a banana and he was able to smell it
same thing when I walked in with a cup of coffee

i could not say that some people have the ability to summon a scent from memory
because this has not been proven yet

List of scents I can summon on demand:

  1. The scent the stem of a rose bleeds right when it’s cut.
  2. The body odor of grandmothers.
  3. The honey-sweet scent of breast milk on a baby’s warm cheeks.
  4. A banana.
  5. Coffee.
  6. Mastic.
  7. Amaretto.
  8. Leather.
  9. Tobacco, pipe Tobacco.

every scent i am able to recall is associated with a pleasant memory
i an not able to recall a scent associated with a bad memory

~ last tambourine, take it all in while you can

Notes:

  1. last tambourine = Someone we know.
  2. Photo: Marta Dzedyshko (via Pixels)

Pomodori

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To travel is to eat. We were tucking into our lunch, which is to say Laura was munching crackers and I was eating bread and pomodori. These tomatoes tasted nothing like English tomatoes. They tasted tomatoey. I ate them one after another, the taste like a memory of childhood which actually turned out not to be a taste but a smell of taste, the reddening green smell – I had it exactly – of my Uncle Harry’s greenhouse in Shurdington where the air ripened under glass.

—  Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Notes:

  • Photo Source
  • Inspired by: I picked up the book after reading “Vivian Gornick: ‘I Couldn’t Finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming‘: (The Guardian, March 26, 2021): “The last book that made me laugh Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer is a brilliant book. For me, the best thing he ever wrote. A little bit of genius, it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh.”

Spring

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And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.

How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?

— Louise Glück, from “Mock Orange” in The Triumph of Achilles 

Notes:

Saturday Morning

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(She) enjoyed the privilege of stillness, most days did absolutely nothing but breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning.

A self-appointed Judge of Existence.

~ Niall Williams, “This Is Happiness” (Bloomsbury Publishing; December 3, 2019)

 

Photo: Carlos Gotay (via Mennyfox55)