Nostalgia triggers...

[Subdivisions]

Hi DU Lounge! Long time no see! Anyways, the s/o and I decided to go for a drive with our grand-daughter and chihuahua Kitty today out by the Brazos River. I don't know what we were yammering on about but along the way something happened that brought nostalgic memories rushing back to remind me of an earlier time. It was the smell of burning leaves.

Sniiiiffff! Ahhhhh! The smell of burning leaves! What memories that brings back of the times when I was a little kid and my immediate and extended family were all young, even the adults! Leaf day was always fun. Raking the leaves into piles and then wheel-barrowing them to the ditch out past the hedgerow and along the street on Grayson Ave in Newport News, VA - Grandma's old house where her and Grandpa lived. He died when I was five but Grandma stayed there for many more years and each year all of us would get together in the fall and cook out and clear the yard of leaves. Us kids loved helping to rake the leaves into heaving piles. Then, it was a race to see who would get to the pile first and dive in. Sometimes being first wasn't all it was cracked up to be when your were first and followed into the pile by ten of your brothers and cousins piling in on top of you! And burning them was just as much fun and we smelled like smoke and sweat come evening were tired enough to sleep without a bath.

The smell of the leaves burning; the aroma of the grill; and, the love and security of a large young family to enjoy it with. Oh if for only a moment to live those nostalgic memories all over again. That's what I did today upon smelling those burning leaves.

What triggers such nostalgia for you?

ETA: Here's my Kitty:

[hippywife]

1. Smells and tastes,

which are interconnected anyway, are the strongest memory triggers there are. Those always set me off.

Um...cute kitty. :rofl:

[rcrush]

2. Hay thats not a cat!

[zanne]

3. The smell of rain on hot asphalt....

That always brings back childhood memories. And I love your kitty!

[Chan790]

4. Madeleines dipped in tea.

(Please someone get that. I'll be so disappointed in all you literary-types if nobody gets that reference. I'm reading that book now and really want to discuss it.)

Subdivisions, the most-common term for these sorts of sensual recollections is souvenir involontaire (involuntary memory), a concept which goes back in the humanities as far back as human history does and made famous by the work of Marcel Proust towards the end of the 19th century and into the the very-early 20th century. I think I like nostalgia trigger just as well as it is a little clearer what is being said about these experiences.

No, not really on the Maddies and tea. Petrichor though, absolutely...it's the smell of thunderstorms (and certain bacterial wastes being aerated) which also makes it the smell of getting caught 2 miles from home in a flash rainstorm in the middle of virgin forest. Blood...I never knew why the shack at the back of the property smelled like blood and why I was forbidden to enter it until I was so bold at 12 and it all became so so clear why so many of my animal friends disappeared over the winter; the expression "taken to the woodshed" is a bit ghastly when you know what they really mean by it. Haylofts and great-piles of the fallen leaves (and their associated scents) will always be dirty, naughty places somewhere in the back of my mind.

I grew up in the inner-city to parents who didn't want to be accused of "white flight" so we stayed...but they used to send us out to my grandparents non-bovine dairy farm in the country in the summers so we could "learn about life." Considering that they're Nixon-Republicans and they now have 3 leftists for sons, 2 of whom are socialists, 2 artists, 2 advocates of radical-agrarianism (F*ck the man! Tear out the courtyard of your high-rise and plant a vegetable garden! Pasture the golf courses! Feed the world!) and 1 vegetarian for their troubles, I'm thinking they'd wished we'd learned a little less about life.

[grasswire]

5. a poet wrote your sentiment

Backward, turn backward O time in your flight
Make me a child again, just for tonight.

[Tikki]

6. Highway 101 (SoCal)...late at night...

or early in the morning (however you look at it). All the shadows outside and
the dashboard lights and the car radio droning on that time of night....

When we are on 101 at night we get nostalgic for all the fun places we went to in
Hollywood and points just East and West.

The Tikkis

[Odin2005]

7. MUSIC!

Certain periods in time and events often get associated with specific songs in my head. For example, 7th Grade for me is associated with the song "Hey Now, You're an All Star" by Smash Mouth. 2005 is associated with "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", by Green Day. 2006 is associated with the remake of the Genesis song "Land of Consfusion" by Disturbed.

[BuelahWitch]

8. Music for me too

Got a big dose of nostalgia the other night watching the Timelife Soul of the '70s infomercial.

[blueknight]

9. fresh mowed grass or hay,

always reminds me of growing up in ky.

[blueknight]

10. fresh mowed grass or hay,

always reminds me of growing up in ky.

[Arugula Latte]

11. Lots of things, but perhaps the most powerful for me is the smell of cedar chips

It reminds me of the barns I used to hang out in as a horse-crazy kid. That was the smell of pure joy to me.

[surrealAmerican]

12. The smell of the ocean...

... brings me right back to Coney Island when I was a small child.

[Mopar151]

13. New mown hay for sure

pine sawdust
bacon cooking
cannibas indica
woodsmoke, CAM2 race gas, methanol, nitromethane, Castrol R (but only when burned correctly)
bread baking

[dixiegrrrrl]

14. A certain brand of aftershave.

My first love wore it.
Early 70's.
He broke my heart years later.The smell of it still can make me misty-eyed.

[Capn Sunshine]

15. My new shaving cream, the scent of it

triggered a memory of my grandmother's home in the UP of Michigan. She ran a board and care facility in part of it, and the linoleum floors were mopped daily with antiseptic. The smell would waft into the living quarters where w kids would be engaged in something kewl and Michigan like; cleaning wild strawberries, or planning an excursion over to Au Sable Lake.....

That smell was a component of my shaving cream, and every morning it has triggered very specific Michigan Summer memories like rototilling the dark loamy soil which smelled so different than the adobe of Southern California...and the summer's love lying on a mat of green moss by a waterfall with sunlight twinkling through the trees as I gazed into her laughing ice blue eyes......


whoa.

[dixiegrrrrl]

17. awwwwwwwwwww....I hear ya.

[enigmatic]

16. "Rollll on, Big O...."

http://recluseshow.blogspot.com/2008/05/vintage-cleveland-tv-lawsons-roll-on.html