Words, whether presented in fiction or nonfiction, can evoke sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and felt sensations. Sometimes these are sensations that are familiar, or that once were. But sometimes digging in your memory won’t do it for you, if it’s a sensation you’ve never experienced, such as a sight you’ve never seen, never even seen the likes of, not even in pictures. If it’s completely foreign to your experience, only your imagination will serve to create for you the sensation the writer is describing. But sometimes the writer’s description does indeed bring a sensation floating back to you from however far away.
Take the smell of freshly washed and newly dried laundry that did its drying not while tumbling in a machine but while hung outdoors on a line. Or take the sound of those clothes and linens flapping in a stiff breeze as they hang on the clothesline. Can you relate? I recently read a description of laundry being buffetted on a clotheline, and it instantly took me back to my childhood.
Though I grew up in the suburbs, we nonetheless lived in an apartment building, not a private house, so our clothesline wasn’t in a backyard but, rather, on the flat roof of the building. Every apartment had its own square clothesline, and though the building did have a laundry room with electric washers and gas dryers, my mother liked to dry the wash up on the roof at least some of the time because of the fresh, outdoorsy smell that such drying conferred on the laundry. “Smell!” she would command with a smile as she took a deep breath and passed a sheet or pillowcase to me. “It smells roof-y!”
I also recently read about two dogs’ encounter with a skunk, and once again a scene came to mind—a relatively more recent scene, this time. I was in the living room of the first house I lived in when I first moved down to Florida. A friend was in my living room with me, visiting, when suddenly a distinct and distinctive aroma wafted in the open window. “Smell—it’s a skunk!” I remarked to Marilyn. My house was located near the edge of the housing subdivision it was located in, and there was an undeveloped and overgrown property immediately next to it. Clearly there was a skunk somewhere in that uncivilized tangle of vines and weeds and trees and shrubs, and it had made its presence known to us.
Words can bring back not only sensations but the memories associated with them. I haven’t seen or thought of my old friend Marilyn in years, but reading about those dogs’ skunk encounter brought that whole scene back to mind.
Words are indeed powerful—almost to the point of being magical. But then, any writer or any reader surely knows about the magical power of words.