I love to build intentional smell memories. We all have smell memories anyway, so why not manipulate them to do what we want?  

I have a whole bunch saved up on accident.  

The plastic smell of pool toys takes me immediately to the lake my family spent so many days at every summer and that we still visit with our kids. So do sour cream and onion chips. I can feel the seam of the floatie scratching my sunburned skin right now.

Engine grease and Orange Glo make my Daddy almost physically visible at the porcelain kitchen sink in my childhood home.  And freshly cut wood transports me into the woods my sisters and I grew up in, throwing the logs Daddy split into the truck only to take them out again and restack them back at the house as we helped prepare for winter. 

Molasses conjures my Grandma Eldeane’s kitchen table and cold biscuits that were always in the tin on the sideboard. Cigarette smoke is the smell of the constant stream of family and visitors who would come in and out of her house to visit for a while. 

Sweaty horses and sweet feed smell just like long days spent with my Altom cousins riding horses until we were as worn out as the horses were.

American Crew smells just like the boyfriend from high school who stuck around to become my husband. 

They’re not all good, though.  I’ll spare you the list, but after three fairly nauseating pregnancies, I could spend quite a while going through all the smells that will make me sick.  And there are some smells I associate with people and events I’d rather forget as well.

A few years ago, it occurred to me that I could make smell memories on purpose.  Tea is a cheap and easy way to do that. 

Before our last family trip to the beach I bought some loose leaf tea (Lemon Souffle) from Good Measure Market, and I saved it for that trip.  I steeped it for the first time when we got there, took it out barefooted onto the back deck, and breathed it in while I soaked up everything around me. Now, anytime I want to be back at the beach, hearing the waves and the gulls and smelling the air, I just make a cup of Lemon Souffle, and there I am.

When Chad and I took a fall trip to the Smoky Mountains it was much colder than it had been at home, and Earl Gray helped keep me warm.  Today, as snow falls longer than is typical for Arkansas and piles much deeper than my kids have ever seen, the warm and spicy citrus of Earl Gray is helping me to capture this cozy cold-weather feeling, too, and wrap it up with that relaxed, pleasant trip Chad and I took.

And one of my very favorites: several years ago we met Chad’s brother and his wife in Peru, where they lived at the time, to visit Machu Picchu. Chase, my brother-in-law, introduced me to a combination of Peruvian teas (cinnamon and clove tea steeped with lemongrass tea) that I loved.  I brought some home and have rationed it so carefully that I still have a little left.  Everytime I drink it I can smell the damp mountain air of the small mountain-side city we stayed in, taste the salty cheese that was on the breakfast bar each morning, and hear the water rushing outside the window of our hotel.

It doesn’t have to be tea.  Lotions, oils, foods, candles… there are a lot of ways to go about it. Start now, today, finding ways to build a memory bank of smells and good feelings that you can use any time you need a break.  It’s such a gift to yourself to be able to revisit places and times you may never see again with a smell.

I’m gonna spend the rest of this snow day breathing in some Earl Gray.  Maybe it will help me find a moment of cool escape come August.