QotD: Scents & Sensibilities
What's the strongest association you have between a scent and a memory?
When I think of scent and memories on the good side, every time I smell baked lasagna, baked macaroni and cheese, or baked ziti, I have the memory of coming home from school and knowing my grandmother is visiting (she had a key, and would come over about once a month) and she's making one of my favorite dinners. She made the most amazing baked mac 'n cheese though it wasn't anything like stuff you get in a box or at a restaurant, this was homemade and had a cream sauce that wasn't too cheesy, but it would be baked with cheese on top to pull it together.
On the bad side, whenever I smell some really strong dairy odors, I'm instantly drawn back into a memory from grad school. We had this gnarly class that studied movement of pollutants in soil -- it was part math, part fluid dynamics, and part soil science. Anyway, as we spent months developing mathematical models, the instructor thought hey, while we're sitting here being brainiacs coming up with scenarios for farmers and dairy owners to control their waste, why not visit a local Chino dairy to see what the real operation looks like?
So we pile into cars and head the 20 miles upwind to Chino and visit a dairy. It was rainy and muddy but fun to meet a diary owner and see how the crazy sucking machines work. When the professor asked him about how he handles waste, he said "oh, lemme show you the evaporation pond"
I've smelled burning hair and I've smelled burning skin at the scenes of fires and accidents. Burning humans is supposed to be one of the worst smells on earth. But let me tell you that smelling a giant pond of concentrated waste that has been evaporating down in the sun to a sludge from hundreds of cows nearly knocked me off my feet and I began to gag. I was very close to vomiting and had to take a walk for an attempt at fresh air, and I only got as close as 50 feet away from it.
It was the worst smell I've ever smelled, and any trip near a dairy reminds me of the super stank I endured that afternoon.
