Fall has arrived, and most of us wish we could bottle something from the summer just gone.
What is it we love? The smell of new flowers. Dinner on the grill. Sunscreen and cut grass. Somebody else’s barbecue two gardens over. And that sharp zing of a lemon the moment you cut into it, before you squeeze it into a cocktail, an appetizer, or a big jug of lemonade.
There is a real connection between smell and memory. A familiar scent can put you back in a place, or beside a person, before you have had time to think about it. You do not decide to remember. It simply happens, and you are 26 again, or nine, standing in somebody else’s kitchen. Nothing else works quite so quickly.
For me, it is lemons. That will surprise absolutely nobody. But it is more particular than just lemons. It is the smell of lemons in a warm kitchen with the door propped open, and too many people talking at once, and somebody telling me I am doing it wrong. Thirty years of that. One lemon, cut in half, and there they all are.
Here is the part I have come to love about getting older. You have more of these than you used to. Decades of summers, layered up, and any one of them can be opened again by something as sma...