Associations

Do you ever get those sudden memory flashes that aren't really related to a specific memory, but to a time or a place in your life?

I so often smell something, hear a certain sound or even see a shape or colour that transports me somewhere or sometime else. For example, if I hear the sound of the icecream van with its tinkly music driving through the suburbs, I am taken back to when my brother and I (aged about five and nine respectively) would beg my mom for money, jump on our bikes and cycle madly through our neighbourhood, stopping occasionally to try and hear which direction the tinkle was coming from.

Or if I smell ceylon tea, my memory is of sitting with my grandparents on their bed, early in the morning when I was very young on my first away-from-home-on-my-own trip to them. They would make tea at about 6am every morning before they got ready for the day and I would cuddle with them on their creaky old bed, surrounded my huge floral-patterned pillow, carefully sipping my weak, sweet tea out of a proper china teacup, which made me feel very grown up. My gran has been gone for almost 15 years now, but it's still one of my strongest memories of her.

There are other associations I have that I can't explain very well. A certain rich afternoon light always reminds me of my exchange in Melbourne, Australia, when I was in high school, and I'm not sure why that is.

Sometimes the slightest things that I don't even really notice consciously will give me what I call the "holiday feeling". Do you know the one? When you feel all excited with butterflies in your tummy, as though you are in some exotic foreign place on an adventure, but for no real reason?

I'm trying so hard to pin this down and make it make sense to myself (and perhaps you), but it's so difficult to explain. This morning, for instance, I was looking through my LOLcat newsletter (always a good way to start the day) and I saw this photo:

And all of a sudden a memory of our family trip to Bosnia came to me and I felt exactly how I felt on that day, yet I can't explain what it was in the photo that spoke to that memory. Perhaps the building in the background reminded my subconscious of something there? I'm not sure, but it had nothing to do with the cats - the subject of the photo.

*Sigh* I'm very up in the air in my posts at the moment. Sorry. Exploring the inside of my head a bit, I guess. It's sometimes more interesting in there than out in the real world of writing press releases and filling in tax forms.

Have a good weekend, y'all. I plan to ;-)