Time Machine by Anna Kingston

I have a time machine, but instead of me using it, rather it uses me. 

I can’t often control the journeys, but they are often marvellous, sometimes emotional, sometimes hilarious, occasionally too sad to bear.

You’ve probably got one, too.

Not a Jules Verne contraption, of course, unless there’s something you’re not telling me?!

No, my/your time machine is our sense of smell, and it drags you, unbidden, years and miles into your past, making you bear witness to your younger self.

What sends you back in time?

Certain cooking smells?  Perfume?  Woodsmoke?  Warm, damp earth?  Fresh paint or creosote?

For me it can be raspberries cooking away in a pan, that takes me back to being 7 or 8, and watching mum making jam in our tiny little kitchen.

Or Chanel No 5, first given to me by a friend whose dad travelled for work, and was rather well off, so thought nothing of bring back such luxuries for his daughter; she gave me a bottle, saying she already had one and didn’t need it!

Then there’s the smell of orange oil, reminding me of mum again, and her Aqua Manda toiletries, just about the only fragrance I remember her wearing.

All these, and more, bundle me into my time machine and take me, willingly or not, back years, sometimes decades.

Often I’m very willing to go, but sometimes the timing’s rubbish!

But there are some smells that take me back to times that are too painful to remember, that remind me of beloved people long gone, of uncomfortable decisions or situations, of things I don’t want to remember.

Whenever I’m in a hospital, the clinical smell propels me into distant wards with dying loved ones or, worse, being too late and missing them at the end.

That fusty smell in a pile of old books or fabrics long hidden in a cupboard?  Elderly relatives’ homes, some with bad memories, some good, but I can’t control which memory will resurface.

Certain suncream smells that recall a boyfriend I’d rather forget, and unpleasant incidents.

Then there are smells that are simply nostalgic, that remind you of a time and place when you had few cares, or where you could forget ‘real’ life for a while.

The smell of just-lit or just-blown candles, and incense, puts me in church on Sunday mornings, particularly sunny days when the dust motes sparkled lazily close to the windows, the priest’s voice gentle in the background.

Warm, damp earth on a still, early, summer morning speaks to me of waiting, impatiently, on our steps onto the road for mum to be ready, setting off early for a day at the seaside.

The smell of hot, greasy, vinegary chips transports me to the Friday and Saturday nights of younger years, racing, laughing, to the chippy after last orders in the local pub.

Can you, do you, smell your past?  What does your childhood smell of?  How about your first love, or last home?  Where will your time machine take you the next time that you inhale deeply, and ‘that’ smells hit your nose and races up into your limbic brain?

© Anna M. Kingston

June 2021