Knowing little about the science of smell and pheromones, I too find it interesting. It being something that is difficult to quantify, it seems to be able to trip visual, mental and even physical reactions that are so definitive and specific that it’s mind blowing to me. Due to a habit that I cannot mention on here, I consider me ‘sense of smell’ to be long gone, yet specific odors snap my attention often before others in the same environment.

The sent of honeysuckle in June is one that will always take me back to a porch glider and my first heavy petting behind a trellis many years ago. There is a special soap that was often used when anal sex was about to happen that causes an erection even now when showering alone.

Even just the memories of a smell are powerful. As a kid I lived not far from bread factory, not just a bakery. You could go by and see the loaves of bread through the front windows, going up hill on a conveyor belt that was a half block long. The smell that was piped out into the street is a vivid and pleasant today as it was a half century ago.

The sent of an over heating electrical motor or a burnt ballast in a fluorescent light fixture are each unmistakable to me. The smell of cutting oil when you enter a small machine shop is not necessarily pleasant or unpleasant, but a very friendly one.

Tangerines were something that was only around my house at Thanksgiving and Christmas time and are so synonymous for me that I go around squirting the rind in the air at my son and daughters house so my grand kids might also have the pleasant memories.

Gun powder and blood really DO have very distinctive smells.

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