The sense of smell and memory

And how we almost had nothing but a tub of Nivea cream

There may be no sensory connection more powerful, or more quietly devastating, than the one between smell and memory.

Lavender takes me straight back to the garden of the house I lived in when I was five. I remember the clothesline I used to swing on more vividly than I remember the house itself. I couldn’t tell you the street name or describe the furniture inside, but the scent of lavender brings the whole place rushing back, intact.

That idea lingered with me while writing The Spoon and the Sea: how scent survives long after names fade. In the novel, smell becomes the thread of a fragile but persistent way to hold the past together.

My husbnd Eitan inspired the habit of one of the main characters, who smells everything before he eats it, even a glass of water. At first, it seems like a quirk, something idiosyncratic or childlike. But for Eitan (and the character), smell is how he anchors himself. Because scent shapes taste, and taste shapes memory, and memory is how he orients to the world.

When my grandmother died, the only thing I took from her bedside table was a small blue tin of Nivea cream. The smell of it is her: her face, her hands, her cheek when she rested in the afternoon sun. Even now, opening the tin brings tears to my eyes. Once, during a fire in our building, we had to evacuate in a hurry. I didn’t take documents or valuables. I took the Nivea. My husband still jokes that if the building had burned down, that would’ve been our sole possession to start over with, and in a strange way, maybe that would’ve been enough.

Scent is more than memory. It’s the echo of presence and the proof that someone was here, and that we were loved.