Infuse with the scent of your choosing

When I was a little girl some of my most prized possessions were my smelly felts. Which now that I’ve typed it out I realize the words look a lot like smelly farts. sigh.

I know that that’s not really their name, but who ever actually referred to them as scented markers? No one, that’s who. They were, throughout my whole childhood, ALWAYS known as smelly felts. FELTS!

Owning a set where the cherry wasn’t dried out and the green felt smelled like apples and not mint, made you popular, at least in my odd little bohemian crowd of 7 year old artists.

I loved my smelly felts. 

(FELTS. Damn it I can’t edit this without reading farts now.)

Drawing with them made creating art seems more adventurous somehow. I know now as an adult, having read science blogs and the like, that smell is deeply connected to memory centers in the brain. Perhaps that what made smelly felts so wonderful – the art  was more real because of the scents associated with the creation process and afterwards.

Anyway, what I do know is sometime between my childhood and now they changed the scents of some of the markers – the black one for instance – was Licorice when I was a child and changed to Burnt Marshmallow at some point.

Now I’ll admit the burnt marshmallow scent was okay, but it is not the same as the rich, mucilaginous thickness that is black licorice.

I didn’t even like black licorice as a child, but I loved the smell of that marker.

A couple weeks ago I found some packs of ‘Mr. Sketch Scented Markers’ at the store. The first thing I did was check the back of the package – if the black marker was still burnt marshmallow I wasn’t buying, but YAH! 

Black Licorice was back!

They also had a pack of fancy limited edition “Movie Scents” so I picked up them too. 

The next couple weeks at work were super busy so I forgot about the packages and then decided to save them until I was on holiday. 

They became my treat and the anticipation of smelling them again was somehow deeply compelling. The waiting would make it that much better, like dessert. So I waited.

And I waited some more.

Then I started to worry... what if the black licorice didn’t smell like it did when I was a child? What if it had changed and didn't invoke the same power it did 25 years ago?

So I waited, and waited more. Until finally the time can when I was ready.

Seriously this was like drinking my first sip of champagne, graduating from university, getting married and watching my child take his first step all rolled into one event – the uncapping of a black marker.

And it smelled exactly as I remember it.

Black delicious freaking licorice. Divine!

What’s really strange though is that while I put a lot of pressure on that black marker to deliver and it did. AND it did remind me of my childhood; in the end it wasn’t the marker that carried the most influence over my memories.

It was the brown marker – Cinnamon - which invoked a much more powerful memory of my childhood.

I think this was because I had totally forgotten the brown marker cinnamon scent. 

I remembered loving the black marker, even if I couldn’t recall the smell. I could remember deep inhales of the black one from when I was a child so there was a part of my brain that was ready, a part of my brain that was prepared.

Not so with the brown marker. There was no anticipation when I uncapped the brown marker and sniffed it. No desire to relive a memory, no vague memories triggered even by reading on the package that the brown marker was cinnamon scented. Unlike the black maker the brown one had no associations attached to it.

Then I uncapped it.  

Memories flooded back – completely unexpected and with more power than the black one could have ever had.

I remembered being a child at the kitchen table, markers in hand, paper scattered about drawing and imaging myself away from the world. The fantasy worlds I created on those papers were full of forests and trees.

There were houses full of elves and fairies, dragons and gnomes, and every one of them were cinnamon scented because I used the brown marker.

My childhood is scented with cinnamon.  I remember this now.

My imagination is scented with cinnamon, all the places I created to escape to are scented with cinnamon.

It is both wonderful and overwhelming to have those memories return. How could I have forgotten?

Now I can remember the scent of the trees drawn on the paper. I can remember the paper damp with ink, fragile and limp. After colouring with the markers I had to be careful with the paper or it might rip; the moisture in the ink made it delicate. These fantasy worlds were not safe until the ink was dry, they could tear and split so easily.

I can remember how stiff the paper became after the ink dried. The ink made it stronger, stable and somehow indestructible. These worlds of cinnamon trees and houses and cherry rooftops, apple leaves, blueberry scented sky and banana scented suns existed, really, really existed after the ink was dry.

These are the important pieces to remember. It is bittersweet, the bittersweet scent of cinnamon, to have these memories back. All of this because I bought some markers to colour the wreakage. 

Not Smelly Felts.
But clearly I've always engaged all my senses
during the creation of my art. 

~~~ 

On a side note: the movie scented markers are super gross. Nacho Cheese smells like rotting vegetables, chocolate mint smells like BAD cheap crumbly chocolate, buttery popcorn smells stale popcorn on the theatre bathroom floor and hard candy smells like medicine. Blue Slushy is redeemable and Root Beer smelled like an old fashion general store, so I like that one. Reminds me of those ‘old time village museums’ where you could buy stick candy in lots of different flavors from glass jars on the counters. You know, like the one's Laura always wanted on Little House on the Prairie. 

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