author's note: this is not a poem. i just had nowhere else to write it and i was basically writing this whole thing in my head last night while trying to fall asleep (but failing miserably) and i want to share it. p.s. it's fucking long.
it is said that scent and sound are your most memory-evoking senses, and while this is a scientifically proven fact, many find it hard to believe. they say that sight is obviously the sense that will bring back the most past thoughts and adventures; it triggers the majority of stimuli in your body - much more often than scent or sound or taste or touch, anyway; it is the dominant sense, the sense that will affect your decisions through distortion of reality far more than any other.
these statements, however, are common misconceptions. you see, when one sees a picture of their grandmother they will think of their grandmother - maybe of how she used to tell stories of growing up in poverty and of meeting the love of her life and of running away to get married and never returning. or maybe they will think of the quaint little house she lived in, or of the horses roaming through the lush grass of the meadows outside that beautiful little house, or of the snow that covered that meadow in a soft white blanket when winter came, and how all the children would get together and make snowmen and their grandmother sat with the horses and looked out the window of the barn at her grandchildren with a content heart.
the point is, when one sees a picture of their grandmother, they could think of anything. there is no one memory that comes to mind; there are so many possibilities, so long as the memory reminds them of their grandmother, and pertains to her in one way or another.
when sound comes into the equation, however, things get more precise. as opposed to sights - which you see thousands of each and every day - certain sounds, such as a song or an animal or the distant calling of the ocean waves persuading you to enter the great abyss, will bring back certain memories.
when one hears the gentle pitter-patter of rain on the low roof of a house mixed with scratching paws on hardwood floors and the low hum of a television in the background, they may think of an exact moment in their life when these sounds were nearly identical. rather than simply thinking of the stories their grandmother used to tell, they might think of that one night when they were planning on riding the horses up the hill to watch the sunset, but the rain came so they were stuck inside. they decided to make the most of this fork in the road, so as the television played in the living room stuffed with blow-up matresses for all the family, their grandmother told the story of meeting their grandfather at a dance where he asked her to dance, but she declined because she had a headache, so he came back with some ibuprofin and a glass of water. she told the tale of this encounter while sissy the australian shephard bobbed around waiting for someone to play with her, thus causing the sound of a curious dog roaming around, a sound everyone had grown to love.
so you now see how nostalgic one sound can be. scents can be even more complicated.
when one smells simply the sweet aroma of lavender-scented soap, they may think of the day their grandmother came home with soap and laundry detergent and cleaning fluids of that exact same smell, and how she worried that it was too strong but declared that she loved it too much to buy a different scent when someone agreed that it was, in fact, very strong. they may think of the very bathroom in which that soap sits on the sink - a bathroom in which they hid and cried when things were not going as planned.
when one smells the scent of fresh snickerdoodle cookies baking in the oven, they may think of attempting to make that very kind with their grandmother, who was going off of memory (and whose memory had lost its finesse over the years), and how, because of this, their cookies ended up smelling amazing but having the consistancy of a stale brownie and a strange aftertaste of scrambled eggs.
