My Favorite Scent

Dear Leta,

One of my favorite smells is cigarette smoke. I know this sounds weird, but hear me out. 

The smell reminds me of my grandpa, who died when I was in high school. We’d go visit him and my grandma at their cabin in northern Wisconsin, where the smell of cigarettes mixed with those of sunscreen, ferns, and fireworks.  I remember standing near him while he poured lighter fluid on an unlit campfire and telling my cousins and me to back up and not tell Grandma about this before lighting a match and throwing it on the pyre. His smile would wink at us as he offered fifty cents to any child who could use the same plastic cup for the entire weekend. (Make sure you write your name on it in Sharpie and put it somewhere safe so the grown-up don’t throw it away). We would lie face down on the deck trying to catch crayfish with a net while he smoked and cast for bluegills, fish and smoke and moss and water.

It reminds me of London, where I studied abroad in college. Coming out of a theater at night, buzzed from the performance, making my way through the crowd of smokers on the way to the Tube. Or lying on the grass in Kensington Gardens, dozing over my homework, listening to teenagers play rugby and smelling the cigarettes of the businessmen on the bench across the path.

I’ve read that smell is the sense most associated with memory.  Being transported to a favorite time and place just by catching a whiff of a hipster’s American Spirit is one of the best things about the human brain that I can think of. Now I’ve never been a smoker, and I don’t plan on ever picking up the habit, but when I walk by someone smoking a cigarette I breathe in deep to remember lakes and cities.

Love,

Gena