LUCY BURDETTE: even if you’ve never read Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you will probably have heard of his madeleine. He described how biting into a madeleine cookie caused an old memory to resurface--which he wrote about for pages and pages and pages.
This morning I am wondering about objects in our home or office that might do something similar. Mine is an old dictionary with my name inscribed in gold leaf as grade winner of the Metropolitan Spelling Bee hosted by the Detroit News. When I see that book, or when I hear news of this year‘s national spelling bee, I am instantly back in sixth grade. I easily won my sixth grade spelling contest in our school and was sent on to the district championship. Sixth grade was probably the nadir of my shyest, most awkward years. I can remember my father quizzing me from a small booklet with a deep blue cover. I remember wearing black and white saddle shoes to the district competition (so very uncool!) I remember being too shy to ask anyone where I should wait, instead I fell into the nearest line. Other kids made mean comments and I eventually realized that this line was a class that was waiting to be seated, not a line for contestants. I also can remember like it was yesterday the word that I went down on. Epic. E P I C. Epic. Only it turned out it wasn’t that version of the word it was another, EPOCH. I definitely should have asked for a definition!
Can you put your finger on something in your home or photo album that brings back a very specific memory?
HALLIE EPHRON: Lucy’s question got me flipping through albums, looking for early memories. Here’s the earliest triggering a memory. It’s me (the little one) in my sister Nora’s lap with my sister Delia looking devilish to the side.
The picture triggers 2 memories. One is the dresses my sisters are wearing - they’re actually pinafores worn over white blouses (with lace collars and sleeves). I remember that when they got handed down to me the cotton was starched and scratchy. And I remember the wallpaper. That was the bedroom my sisters shared and the wallpaper was blue-and-white checked. Eventually my dad took over that bedroom and that paper got replaced with a neutral grasscloth.
So many of my earliest memories are purely visual.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I just saw an ad that some store was selling cereal-scented candles, supposedly to remind people of their childhoods. Trix is one, and Lucky Charms, and Cocoa Puffs. Okay, that’s weird, and let me just say those fragrances would not make me nostalgic. But we have a photo of me with my sister Nina, she must have been four and me–seven? We are on the patio of…somewhere, and we are having a foot fight. For the unenlightened (those not in my family) that entails sitting on the floor, feet out in front of you, placing the soles of your feet to the other person’s soles and then pushing to see if you can get your legs straight out and make the opponent's legs bend. We are really having fun, and it reminds me how close we used to be. They used to call us Ann-and-Nina, as if we were one person.
(Just as an aside, I was CLEARLY destined to win the spelling bee, and then I missed ALCOHOL. ALcohol! I think of that humiliation and frustration with myself every time I see that word.)
DEBORAH CROMBIE: I was thinking about this, and then a photo half hidden by the mouse pad on my desk caught my eye. It's a faded snap of a brown tenement building. A round rice-paper ceiling lamp glows in one window on the fourth floor. It's the flat my first husband and I lived in in Edinburgh. Just that glimpse and I can see it all so clearly! The two-bar electric fire in the sitting room, the heavy dark blue curtains in the bedroom, the convection heater we rolled from room to room (no central heating in these old Georgian buildings!) The biting cold. The view of the Calton Observatory. The smell of pasta cooking and the taste of sherry. Lovely how a little trigger can bring so much back.
RHYS BOWEN: Such an interesting topic. I have various objects I’ve brought with me around the world. One was a baton presented to my grandfather, an orchestra conductor. When I was a child I used to try and conduct with this, not realizing it was ebony and silver and thus TOO HEAVY!
The other trigger is my mum’s sewing box. Even now when I open the layers and inhale deeply inside I can smell home. I can’t identify the scent but I’m there.
JENN McKINLAY: Butter tarts. As soon as I taste a butter tart, I am on the deck at our cottage in Nova Scotia. I can smell the salty bay just yards from the deck mingling with pine trees and abundant summer roses that surround the cottage. I can hear the brook babbling its way down the side yard to the beach, the buzz of the bees, and the zip of the hummingbirds as they fight over the feeder. I can feel the warm sun on my head and the hot cup of coffee in my hand. For a moment, everything is perfect.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I was looking around the house for some aide de memoire I hadn't thought of in a while when i realized... I was 
wearing one! Two, to be exact. My mother, an always-stylish woman, got these chunky silver earrings somewhere in Europe back in the 1970s. They came to me after she passed away, and every time I put them on, I can see my mom sitting at her vanity or leaning forward toward the bathroom mirror, putting them in as a finishing touch to a chic minidress or a flowing Elizabeth-Taylor influenced caftan (Mom, who was very proud of her girlish slimness, had more fitted Moroccan styles than Liz.)
Although I don't have her figure, wearing these connects me to my mother's sense of style, and the way she always had one extra touch to her outfit to finish it off. If I smile in one certain way, I can see her again in the mirror.
How about you Red readers? Tell us about a thing or a photo that evokes a specific memory!
