“Olfactory memory is the hardest kind to erase. It’s the most emotional, the most arbitrary. It opens the doors without knocking.” -Feurat Alani (trans. Kendra Boileau), The Flavors of Iraq: Impressions of My Vanished Homeland, #728

                My love and I are moving into our new home. Today we were gardening in the yard together, weeding around the echinacea and watering the rhubarb and finding a tomato plant nestled in tall grass (hurray!). The smell of all these leaves and stems and soils wash through me.
                What are my olfactory memories that open the door without knocking? So many—and sometimes like a burst of wind they’re here and then gone, hard to locate, impossible to pin down. But a burst of sea air: sometimes I step outside a car near the coast and childhood moments in sand dunes and surf burst around me. Bay trees. And eucalyptus trees, their scent curling like their dropped bark. Beeswax from making candles. Sweat, the smell of bodies, of hiking up into mossy forests. I love the way smells pick me up and carry me, not a flood to lift my heavy body but magic to turn me into mist, swirling here to somewhere else. I love being pulled away from myself which is also being pulled back. 
                I wonder what these olfactory memories are for you. Not the ones you might think of, now, if you tried to remember, but the next one that pushes all through you without knocking on the door.