Portals

A scent caught me the other day — faint, but familiar. My heart remembered before my mind did.

Tomatoes fresh off the vine. Heat. Loneliness. My grandmother’s garden.

Time folding in on itself.

There’s a scent I wear sometimes — Ffern. Seasonal, fleeting. The notes include saffron, bitter orange rind, jasmine sambac. But I don’t really smell those. I smell memory.

Music has the same effect.

I hear Moonshadow and I’m nine again, watching my mother play jacks. Since I Left You places me beside my son Oliver at seventeen — our family DJ, full of curiosity and charge. When Flashlight comes on the radio, it’s 1977 and I’m barefoot on the living room floor, falling in love with funk.

Some sounds do more than remind us who we were. They return us to entire versions of ourselves.

I think design can work this way too.

A typeface can carry tension or playfulness. A color can conjure a forgotten summer. A website, when made with care, can feel strangely familiar the moment you arrive.

Certain things travel past language entirely: a scent, a song, a particular shade of orange at dusk.

They reach the body first. And sometimes design is simply another way we return to ourselves. ✦

The sounds that helped shape this story

• Moonshadow by Cat Stevens, 1975

• Since I Left You by The Avalanches, 2000  • Flashlight by Parliament, 1977

Scent by Ffern.

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