Sep 29, 2023 4 min read

What is it about scent that takes us back so far and so quickly?

My son had only been in my home for five minutes when he picked up the candle on the kitchen counter, removed the glass lid, put his nose inside and inhaled.

“The smell of my childhood,” he said. “Apples!”

I’d like to say the smell brought memories of apple pies baking in the oven, but no. This was, as my kids would say, a “store-boughten” smell: a jar candle that smells like McIntosh apples. It’s a clean smell, crispy and not too sweet.

This time of year, the world gets nutty about pumpkin and spice. Although I’m not above baking a loaf of pumpkin bread – and devouring it if it has chocolate chips – I don’t want my house to smell like that when I’m not baking.

I’ve been trying to remember the first time the pumpkin spice thing was so ubiquitous. Maybe it’s always been around, but the wall of pumpkin first hit me when I owned my first home and, as the autumn leaves started to fall, I experienced that feeling of nesting. Trips to the craft store were for buying dried flower to hot glue onto grapevine wreaths so that I could festoon the front door and living room walls. The stores smelled like pumpkin spice, a fragrance I carried into the house in my bags.

I’ve grown out of pumpkin spice – and maybe out of dried-flower wreaths, too. Around my neighborhood, most front doors have a wreath. The young woman two doors down decorated her lamppost with corn stalks and the most beautiful copper-colored organza bow. If I didn’t live so close, I might have stolen the idea for my own lamppost.

My daughter and her husband will be visiting this weekend, in from upstate New York to attend homecoming at the college where they met. This is Grace’s favorite time of year.

“I can’t wait for summer to be over,” she says.

In the past few weeks, she phoned me as she perused craft stores, looking for ideas to decorate her first apartment. I’m sure she stopped by the coffee place for a pumpkin-spice latte on the way home, another autumny thing I don’t like.

Pumpkin spice must make people buy orange things, in the same way evergreen smells make people buy red and green things at Christmas. Smell is connected to memory because the olfactory area of our brain is right next to the memory place. If our brains evolved differently, maybe our auditory bits would be close to our memory center, and sounds would send us back the way smells do.

One of the strongest scent memories for me is White Shoulders perfume. To smell it now puts me right back to being kissed by our mom. It meant our parents were going out for the evening and a babysitter was coming.

I like to think that the scent of apples brings a good memory for my kids. I’m pretty sure my daughter burns pumpkin spice candles in her home, and that she’s decorated it with lots of warm things that evoke this season.

That’s not my thing, but I decked my front porch for her visit: A trio of red, yellow and orange mums in planters, some small pumpkins scattered in front of them, and yes, a bright orange wreath on the door. It had been in storage for a couple of years, and I had to go digging for it. Not exactly my taste anymore, but I know my kid will like it. It will feel like home.