Autobiographical Memory

I have been reading about memory and how it works.  Especially autobiographical memory.  Some people have nearly total recall of past events in their own lives.  The book I am reading says that some people can recall what day of the week certain events happened on. 

I can't, not to any extraordinary degree.  I can remember the day of the week for the girls being born, getting married, baptized, but everything else was either a school day or a weekend.

Then the book talks about people who remember the weather for every event they recall.  Well, I got that beat over day of the week.  I can remember the weather for everything I can remember in my life.  But another thing the book discussed was sensory memory.  Do you remember colors, tastes, smells?

Who forgets how something tasted?  I didn't know anyone else was not remembering these things.  It seems I remember smells especially well too.  I took their little test, and I passed with flying colors.

Here is my favorite smell in the world, and I am sorry I cannot post it, but I can tell you what it is.  There is about a 90 second window to smell it when it happens before it dissipates, and no, I don't mean skunk spray, haha. 

When Carly blow dries her hair, just as she cuts the dryer off, her scalp and hair has this particular scent.  I call it (not original, but adequate) hot blonde hair.  It is my baby, her clean head, beautiful.  I love it.

Lest my children chance upon this entry and Kimberly feels slighted, let me also mention that my favorite sound in the world is her tinkling baby laugh.  It was like wind rippling through chimes.

So Carly is on this home design kick right now.  She is buying paint, varnish, a sander, ribbons, fabric, staplers, and viewing a lot of websites with "projects" which encourage her to go to yard sales and look for junk to fix up.

We went last Friday morning.  We went to a garage sale in Windber that could have been my mother's yard sale if it was 1400 miles away.  The woman had fabric for sale from the 70's that she never got around to sewing.  It was all double knit.  It even smelled like double knit from my mother's sewing closet.  She had a cake plate pedestal/dome that I could imagine a chocolate layer cake in and I knew exactly how it would taste.  There were all kinds of 70's patterns for clothing, odds and ends, and then on a shelf in the back, a small bottle of Estee Lauder Youth Dew with the little gold bow elastic still on the neck of the bottle.  For a quarter.

I figured the scent had oxidized by now so I picked it up and put it to my nose to check.  By some wonder, it still smelled exactly right.

A kaleidoscope exploded in my memory bank of my mother putting the little gold bow in my hair.  Of her walking down the hall ready for meeting with that smell freshly spritzed on her wrists.  Of the way the bottle looked on the mirrored tray on her dresser.  Of how often my father would buy her a new bottle for anniversaries every February 11.

I felt surreal.  My body was tired from getting up early with Carly, from living 49 years on the planet, from having arthritis in the joints, but my brain was 12 years old again and I could see the weather outside the window of my parents' room, the peach tree that made enough fruit for my grandma to put up jelly each year and how I had to lean down over the handle to mow close to the trunk. 

All day I was upset after that.  I still hate peach jelly.  I used to wonder why they called it Youth Dew.  For the first time, I understood. 

There I was, a pocket full of quarters, and I didn't buy it because I knew I would torture myself with it.  With remembering.  With wishing I could go back in time for real and not just in my mind.  At first I thought that was pretty cool, passing that test and being able to remember so exactly. 

Everything that happened to me as a child, I have always said oh well, I got by, I survived, plenty of girls have it worse, and that's true; they do.  I've studied enough of them to be sure.  I know the statistics on pedophiles and female circumcisions and spousal abuse/murder.  But for the first time, I put the picture of me at 12 next to the picture of Carly at 12, and then Kimberly at 12, and for the first time it struck me that I was that young too.  That I deserved to be 12 too. 

All this time I've been mad at my father.  But there were two parents there.

I still have the smell of Youth Dew in my memory banks, right there fresh in my forehead.  I don't know what kind of memories my daughters have or what might trigger it in the future, but I do know I managed to break that cycle, and they might remember being poor or stressed out, but they will remember being girls.