Old smells, that immeditately transport you back in time?

[ChrisB]

The smell of old pine planks takes me back to the attic of my grand parents house.

 

[loosebolts]

went asphalt and wet pine needles. i smell it and it brings me back to other times.

 

[countryclubjoe]

Ben Gay muscle oitment. My Father believed it was some miracle fix all pain relief medicine. He would ask my Mom to rub down his shoulders and back with it every other night.. The scent would linger in the house all night..
Brings back good memories.
Best regards
CCJ

 

[Seraph1227]

well weathered leather, hot metal and oil, the scent of country air.

 

[VintageBee]

The smell of damp moss and fungi in the hills of my house remind me of an old abandoned hotel I got to stay in when I was a little girl. Some friends of my mom owned it. It was also my first snow, first creek and first fishing trip!!

 

[GHT]

VintageBee, you make that old abandoned hotel, sound like the infamous: "Bates Motel." Don't think I'll be taking a shower there!

The one smell that always brings back memories for me, is that of the mix of oil and steam, as in a steam railway engine.
I used to ride on one to school and back as a youngster. That hissing monster that is a steam train still captivates me today.

 

[buelligan]

Hot metal, my father worked at a place when I was a kid that heat treated metal parts. To this day every time I smell hot metal I think of that place, Funk Metallurgical if I remember correctly. The musty smell of a car in the junk yard takes me back to scrounging through the junk yards in town looking for that one part you needed for your car. Oh almost forgot the smell of tire smoke from a car doing a burnout takes me back to days at the drag strip and being a mischievous teenager with a fast car on an old country road.

 

[Two Types]

Not a very nice one, but the smell of rancid **** (for Londoners think of downstairs in Bradleys Spanish bar on Hanway Street - after the smoking ban!!!!) always takes me back in time to the stench of the toilets (not really a toilet but an open trough) at Bedford Town's ground, 'The Eyrie' in the 1970s.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Along those same lines the smell of chicken deposits makes me think of riding my bike across the old Passagassawaukeag River Bridge down by the evisceration plants. On a summer day, the smell of deceased poultry was so thick you had to push it out of the way with a fork. "The smell of money," everybody called it.

Now that area is completely gentrified and you smell a different kind of money, from the kind of people who think their -- money -- doesn't smell.

 

[stevew443]

For the first 6 years of my life I lived in the largest city of our state. Also, my mother did not drive, so anytime we went anywhere we took the bus (since dad worked out of town so much). So to this day, anytime I smell the aroma of diesel fumes I am taken back to a time and place that I can never again recapture.

 

[St. Louis]

Fortworthgal said this some years ago in this thread. I agree with her about the smell of manure. I find it pleasant (after all, livestock are vegetarians, so their poop doesn't stink.) Years ago, on my first visit to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts I walked into one of the barns there, and the aroma of hay and manure brought my childhood back so intensely, so suddenly, and so unexpectedly that I started to cry. I hadn’t realized until then how much I missed my childhood on my grandparents’ farm. By then I was living and working in Boston, and loved the urban life. But all that was instantly wiped away. Ever since that experience I’ve been yearning to get back to a farm.

Now that I live in the middle of the country I also miss that briny, salty smell of the Atlantic Ocean. When I go back east for a visit I find that almost painful, because I know I won’t experience it again for a long time to come.

 

[Matt Crunk]

For me the smell of WD-40 instantly brings back memories of my first go-cart and motorcycle. Specifically of going with my dad to the motorcycle shop to pick out my first true motorcyle, a Yamaha 80 Enduro. I was eight years old. The smell of fresh rubber and lubricants gets me every time. I can walk into just about any real bike shop today and am instantly transported back to my childhood by the smells.

The same is true when I walk into a barber shop as well.

 

[dh66]

The smell of a kerosene heater, it always reminds me of being at the farmers market with my grandad. In the cooler months they would use them to heat the sheds where the truck farmer's sold their produce.

Sent from my XT1030 using Tapatalk

 

[HudsonHawk]

When I was in college, I was goofy over this girl named Suzy. Suzy was from California, I was young and impressionable, and she had all sorts of radical ideas on politics, and knew fine wines, and listened to New Age "fuzzy" music and was basically the opposite of every big-haired Southern girl I'd ever known. She had a distinct smell...I don't know if it was perfume, or something she used on her hair or what, but boy was I aware of it. I haven't seen nor heard from Suzy in over 25 years, but a while back I was in a meeting at work and one of my coworkers walked in and that smell hit me like a ton of bricks. I had a true Proustian memory

 

[Stormy]

Pine Sol is the smell that takes me back. Sometimes I buy it just to have a bottle of it in the house. It's like a dear old friend.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Gasoline of yesteryear. Especially Ethel...

HD

 

[3fingers]

Suzy was from California, She had a distinct smell..

Since James hasn't stopped by yet.....Patchouli?

 

[GHT]

Do any of you, who own a classic car, ever experience a stranger asking if they can just open the door and lean in? Happens all the time with our MG. It seems that the leather seats and walnut burr dashboard rekindle their memories of family trips to the coast. One elderly gent, having breathed in lungfuls of car seat leather fumes, looked at us, smiled and said: "Are we there yet Dad?"

Up and until the early 1960's most families took what became known in the UK as: The bucket & spade holiday. So called, because all the families could afford, was a week, sometimes two, at one of the coastal towns around our country. The bucket & spade were little plastic affairs that kids played with for hours on the beach. Making sand castles, moats, even burying one another. The long drive, before the days of better highways, resulted in hours of boredom, sitting in a car, playing I-spy, so the catch phrase that everyone knew from those times was: "Are we there yet Dad?"

At about the turn of the sixties, better wages, smaller families all put more disposble income into families pockets, allowing them to spend a couple of weeks on some Mediterranean beach, where they no speaka da lingo.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Since James hasn't stopped by yet.....Patchouli?

I don't know what patchouli smells like, but you're saying Powers has that odor?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Do any of you, who own a classic car, ever experience a stranger asking if they can just open the door and lean in? Happens all the time with our MG.

My car had a very distinctive "old car smell" when I got it -- but it went away when I found and removed a mouse nest the size of a football under the back seat. It now gets a smell of hot metal and gasoline when it's been running a while which is not unpleasant.