One of the things I loved about Moira Young’s Dustlands trilogy was the way she describes smell. The narrator protagonist Saba is caught in a love triangle, as the heroines of young adult fantasy and dystopias often are, and each of her love interests has his own characteristic smell. (Actually, she has three men vying for her attention, but the third does not get a sense description, so we know that we can dismiss him as a contender fairly quickly.) The books are set in a post-apocalyptic world of drought, dust and danger, and on those rare occasions when there is time and water available for bathing, it is described as something wonderfully soothing and quietly aromatic. And her men? One smells of sage and the other of juniper.
image via The Non-Blonde
I had my first kiss in middle school, and the boyfriend in question smelled of Polo, the signature scent of boys in the eighties. And when he gave me his jean jacket to wear, I could carry that smell around with me everywhere. It was the smell of butterflies in my stomach, of relief to be paired up, of pride to show it off. It was the sensory equivalent of the fog I was in in those heady days of fumbling around for a sense of place and selfhood. I loved the smell then, and I took every opportunity to bury my nose in the soft, frayed collar of the jacket. I smell it today with mixed emotions, not all of them pleasant. What hindsight throws into stronger relief is the tumult of emotions that goes along with first kisses and first loves and first heartaches. The 1000th and 10,000th kisses are so very much better, though they never fail to give me butterflies.
What is your scent memory of your first kiss?
4 Mothers 