Smell Memory

The tiled foyer outside Los Angeles Union Station is usually filled with smokers, dragging out a puff before making their way home. Yesterday, though, that smell was mixed with the sharp chemical smell of cleaner, Pine-Sol.

It smelled almost exactly like the main lobby of Wolf House, the Co-Op I lived at during my senior year at UC Berkeley. That smell took me back, almost immediately: a half-remembered crush on a faux-communist named Melissa, the fact the place was always out of cereal, It's Its, and a dozen other memories.

I passed into Union Station proper and the smell of cigarettes faded, leaving only the smell of the cleaner. This too, took me back, but this was much sadder. When I was young, my parents started a program at our church, where they would take food and supplies down to some of the poorer colonias in Tijuana. One of those places was an orphanage, and it reeked of Pine Sol. Heartbreaking to see, even at eight-years-old, and the smell has been associated with hopelessness ever since.

Interesting that a smell, altered ever so slightly, would cause such a different reaction in me, one that happened only minutes apart.