Visiting a site to help bloggers get inspired I received a prompt for what smell reminds you of childhood. My instant thought was not of baking cookies, a roast bubbling in oven, or of christmas trees. No my first thought was of the scent that waft from the door and vents as you pass a laundry mat. That smell is oddly reassuring even today. I have no specific memories of laundry mats though I suppose we went to them frequently in my early childhood. Honestly I have recollections of laundry at all until much later, far after that scent was a way to my happy place.
After we moved to the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn when I was about nine I remember walking north up Henry Street once a week to attend my piano lessons with Benjamin Taberski in a prewar apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. Not far from my home I passed a laundry mat near Long Island College where I would breath in the magic scent of warmed air, residue of soap and fabric softener. The times I bike up hill to the Heights I would barely catch a whiff and missed the heated perfume of electricity and chemicals.
In today's world I don't pass such places often but not too long ago I did and immediately a smile grew on my face as the aroma made it's way up my nostrils and warm diaphanous happy memories with no visuals of my childhood filled my heart.
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