National Blog Posting Month – May 2013 – Comfort
Prompt – Do certain smells make you feel instantly comfortable?
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I consider myself sensitive to smell. Like most people, I have favorite smells and smells that I’m none too fond of.
There is one smell that I do love, that causes most (but not all) people to cock their heads at an angle at me. Most normal people don’t like this smell at all.
Gasoline.
OK. Gasoline, burnt brakes, and rubber.
Garage smells.
Takes me right home to my childhood. Our garage. The air compressor. Oil.
Ah, home.
I don’t trust a mechanic whose shop doesn’t smell right. Our own garage doesn’t have that smell. Not quite.
But take me to a body shop. Or better, the auto races.
Heaven.
For 5-8-13
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 
Right with you on this one. When I was little I spent a week every summer at my grandmother’s house. She lived on the edge of a little one-horse town in Ohio, and in the afternoons my cousins and I would walk the quarter mile to the service station/general store. It would be sunny, hot and dusty on the road but the garage bay doors would be open, making it look like a cave. We’d step inside and it’d instantly be 10 degrees cooler, with the smell of damp concrete floors, motor oil, dust, metal, and old wood like from a barn. We’d walk on through to the store to buy candy and pop, and even the pop coolers had a smell I still remember. They were built like chest freezers, with wire baskets inside with glass bottles of pop lying in them. The inside walls of the coolers were galvanized steel and when it was damp with condensation it had a very distinctive smell. I miss that smell.
But the most comforting smell I remember is that of burning high-sulfur coal. My high-school sweetheart (later my wife) lived in a house where they burned it in the fireplace for heat, and we spent a lot of time together in front of that fireplace.
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Yes, I can see (smell) this! 🙂
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