“The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.” – Mary Stewart
I was watching my old dog, Buddy, amble around the backyard this morning, enjoying a light breeze on an unseasonably pleasant August day, when I smelled a scent that took me back….
to running and laughing around the pool’s edge in a tiny Ohio town, tripping, falling, bleeding, trying to hide the bleeding because I wanted to swim! and I’m ok! I’m ok! A scar the size of a nickel still visible on my knee, a reminder of the power of want.
to walking down the pier at the local lake in my small Mississippi town, stepping over body after body laid out in paisley patterned hues and tints, bare arms and legs, stomachs and backs, glistening with the scent of Coppertone Suntan Lotion floating in the fishy air.
to giggling in a pool in Pass Christian with my best friend, who couldn’t swim and got in water too deep, her head bobbing under and up, under and up, splashing&splashing&splashing and no one else around so I, a barely-there swimmer, grabbed her arm, struggled, pulled, splashed, gulped, panicked her to the shallow end.
to “laying out” in the backyard or on a rooftop on blistering summer afternoons, slathered with Coppertone, in my first bikini - a pepto-bismol pink with a halter style top that tied in back - me & Stacy or me & Debbie or me & somebody I don’t remember now feeling the rays like hot hands all over our bodies, the sounds of birds & bugs & not much else except the transistor & The Doobie Brothers or Creedence or The Allman Brothers - man, did we love all those brothers.
to week-long summer vacations in Gulf Shores, Alabama in the 80s, work abandoned back in the city, walking the almost deserted beach way before high-rise condos erupted their ugly selves as far as you could see, watching slick-bodied dolphins crescent the air, our two dogs running with ears flapping and tongues lolling having the time of their lives and we at the beginning of ours.
And the scent that was wafting on the breeze today? Coppertone Suntan Lotion - a scent I haven’t smelled in too many years to mention. Where did it come from? Was it really Coppertone or something else? I don’t know but it took me right back and it was very cool.
If you're as old as I am, the same feelings will be stirred up if you could find one of those old cobalt blue jars of noxzema, and take a long whiff.. oh my god. I'm, sixteen again. Can't do this too often lest I just drop dead from--from what? wanting to be there again? on the Amagansett Beach in the fifties and sixties? No. Too much money fucked everything I loved .
Beautiful, Char- There's something about those summer smells! Baby oil takes me to summer, back home in WV, when we slathered it on our skin to lay out in the sun. Ah, I might have to do that for a few minutes during these last days of high summer.