Olfactory memories

    For me, the greatest trigger for nostalgia, déjà vu, and other unplanned trips to the past has been odor. Not a visual image, not a familiar sound, but smell. Corn dogs frying in deep fat carries me back to the midway of the Clyde Beatty Circus in Los Angeles, fresh cut pine transports me to a grove of Boy Scout Christmas trees propped up on a vacant lot, and a musty room reminds me of the cabin at Balboa Island we rented one summer when I was twelve. Another stimulant, nearly vanished in real time but strongly impressed in my nasal memory, is relived in only one environment—a drugstore.

     I don't mean today's super-stores. They take on odors typical of the caverns in which they are housed—air conditioning, floor wax, gardening supplies. I'm referring to the small neighborhood pharmacies that acquired their characteristic fragrance through generations of activity. It takes decades to build up that recognizable scent—loose corks and bottle caps allowing vapors to escape and penetrate into wallpaper and woodwork, pungent fluidextracts oozing onto bottle labels, spilled liniments seeping under floor boards and regenerated each day by the tread of busy feet.

   Vintage drugstore odor is not easily defined, it is complex—a combination of volatile oils like lavender and wintergreen blended with creosote, iodoform, benzoin, thymol and other aromatics. Whenever I stumbled across one of these old survivors, the fumes took me back to my childhood and memories of the wonderful array of merchandise that was a drugstore: penny candy, fountain sodas, comic books, hair oil, chemicals for science projects, and rubber tubing for sling shots. For you it may have been Walgreens or Robinson's Corner Drug, for me it was The Rexall Store.

Farrand’s Rexall Pharmacy, Sumner, Iowa circa 1913