Diana Ackerman:
American poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of over two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including the New York Times bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age — books beloved by millions of readers all over the world. In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations urge us to live in the moment, and to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles.
Smell brings to mind a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.
– ‘Scents can suddenly evoke old memories.’
– Those memories sometimes lie hidden for years.
– A single scent can suddenly “activate” them, as if something explodes beneath the surface.
– This often happens ‘softly but powerfully’:
not literally violently, but emotionally intensely.
The metaphor of “landmines” suggests that memories can surface unexpectedly. You walk through the present, as it were, and suddenly a scent takes you back to the past.
🌿 Figurative language explained:
“Family dinner with stew and sweet potatoes”
This evokes a homely, warm memory:
– family
– food
– childhood
– security
– a specific place and time
“A myrtle-crazy August”
This likely refers to an August month in which ‘myrtle/crêpe myrtle’ blooms profusely. It is a sensory image: warm, floral, American, summery. “Scents explode softly”
A paradoxical expression:
– “explode” = sudden, powerful
– “softly” = subtle, inward, emotional
So:
scent memories often come unexpectedly and intensely, but not loudly; they happen inside you.
🧩 Why scent specifically?
Ackerman points out that scent is particularly strongly connected to memory, because smell in the brain is closely linked to areas for:
– emotion
– memory
– instinctive reactions
That is why a scent can sometimes bring you back to a childhood memory faster than a photo or a sound.
📖 Origin:
The passage comes from “A Natural History of the Senses”, specifically from the section/chapter on “smell”.
It is ‘not an old proverb or saying’, but a ‘literary passage’ about how strongly scent is connected to memory and emotion.
The sentence about a family dinner with stew and sweet potatoes is likely part of the same reflection or a translated/adaptive context from Ackerman’s text.
✍️ Author:
– Diane Ackerman
– American poet, essayist, and natural historian
– Known for, among others:
– “A Natural History of the Senses” 1990
– “An Alchemy of Mind”
– “The Zookeeper’s Wife”
