Practices in Smelling: Nostalgia

The scent memories of back to school.

I always get a little emotional this time of year when the stores are lined with new backpacks and school supplies, and I see children meeting up at our local park to share stories of their summer adventures. There’s a real buzz in the air, filled with a sense of excitement and anticipation at the same time.

The “back to school” season has always been nostalgic for me - ripe with scent memories that children just don’t experience in today’s digital age.

The Preparation

Some of my 1980’s school supplies.

Even before I set foot in the classroom, the smell of new school supplies was a clear indication that another school year was starting.

I always got a fresh box of Crayola ® crayons - the one with the built in sharpener (genius, wasn’t it?) which had a distinctive smooth, waxy scent. I still have an odor imprint in my brain of a freshly-drawn page in my coloring book: faint, yet pointy, somewhat sweet and plasticky.

And remember those scented markers? The ones that smelled like artificial cherry, grape, and apple? We definitely spent way too much time inhaling the fumes, but it was probably the closest we got to directly engaging with our sense of smell.

Elmer’s glue is another vivid smell: a pronounced plasticky, slightly sweet scent. Oh, and those pink erasers that smelled of pungent rubber.

Pencils were also a favorite smell. There’s nothing like opening a fresh pack and getting a whiff of that dry, cedarwood scent with a touch of chemical lacquer. I also loved the smell of new paper folders: a hint of pulp, cheap wood, and metallic from the inside clasps.

And who can forget the tin lunchboxes of the 80’s. Remember those? I don’t know what cartoon character I had, but I’m guessing it was either Scooby Doo or Snoopy. They always smelled cool, slightly minerally, and salty from my fingerprints.

Did You Know?
In a 1982 study conducted by Yale University, the smell of crayons was listed as 18th among the 20 most recognizable smells to American adults. That unique odor comes mainly from paraffin wax and stearic acid, and remains mostly the same today.

The Classroom

Classroom smells you (sadly) don’t get anymore.

On the first day of school the classroom always smelled fresh. The mopped vinyl floors emitted an industrial pine odor, the vacuumed storytime rug gave off a powdery note, and the sanitized wooden desks hinted of a terpenic, resinous, woody bouquet.

Of course, the first order of business was sharpening our new pencils in the mechanical pencil sharpener next to the teacher’s desk. That signature scent of the cedarwood pencil being cut as the handle is cranked is etched in my mind as a dry, thin, matte, hay-like odor.

The dark-green chalkboard had only a subtle scent that you had to come up close to appreciate. But start writing on the board with chalk and a dusty, metallic note would appear. And the erasing of the day’s lesson turned the scent into a soft, powdery note.

And, maybe this is uniquely American, but back in the day we had to cover our textbooks with paper bags to protect them from damage. We saw it as an opportunity to show our creativity, drawing on the paper canvas with our personal artistic expressions: notes of wood chips mixed with strong, sharp, chemical notes from the colored markers’ imprint.

What Else?

An old school gymnasium.

There’s something about the smell of an old school gymnasium that’s like nothing else. The dusty, woody, somewhat varnished scent of the wood-plank floors combined with the rubbery, slightly sweet, plasticky smell of the gym mats hanging against the wall. All that together creates a musty, slightly stale atmosphere when you enter on the first day.

A rubber kickball.

Kickball was a favorite activity during recess back then. We used a rubber ball that had a distinct odor that was biting, synthetic latex, puckering, and chemical. Sounds unpleasant if you’ve never smelled it, but if you know it, you treasure the familiarity. Every kick and throw released a whiff - pure nostalgia.

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I guess I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you the further journey down memory lane. I share all this so that maybe it brings up particular back-to-school scent memories for you as well. The kind of smells that take you right back to a time and place like no other.

I know children today don’t encounter the same scents we once did. That thought makes me a little sad, yet every generation carries its own smells. Maybe today’s kids will one day remember the scent of warm computer screens, sanitized desks, and metallic-y smart boards. Still, I can’t help but feel their school days are missing some of the olfactory richness that colored ours.

Which leads me to this month’s Practice in Smelling, I invite you to exercise your smell muscle and connect with the scent memories of your own childhood. Here’s an exercise to try out.