The smell of a room can unlock a decade faster than a photograph.

Smell reaches memory by a shorter route than sight, which is why a doorway or a particular room can return an entire period of your life in a second, complete with the feeling. Photographs give you the image and require you to reconstruct the rest. Scent hands the whole thing over at once, unbidden and unedited.

When that happens, stay with it for a moment rather than shaking it off. It is one of the few unfiltered accesses you have to your own past. Some of what surfaces will be worth knowing.