scratch and sniff

When I was a kid I loved stickers. It was yet another thing that was seen as a girl thing that I enjoyed. So what! I never understood why stickers were for girls and not boys. They made gijoe stickers and spaceship stickers yet like most things that could at all be construed to be cute or little, they were not for boys. I didn’t pay attention to that at all and kept a Kennedy Space Center Binder full of stickers. It was filled with those sticky photopages that were probably a bad idea for keeping stickers in, but they were in use in the 80’s, so I had a ton of pages with stickers on both sides. It was filled with all kinds of stickers. The ones from school with good job or whatever uplifting thing was on it, the gijoe ones I mentioned previously and lots and lots of other ones. I used to buy stickers too. I had hundreds of stickers, maybe thousands I’m not sure. Of course this fed into my collecting personality and so I was probably a little obsessed. It wasn’t so bad though. I never really had much money to spend on them and so it never became a problem. Mostly I got them for free from stores or from stores or trading with other people, mostly girls. The ones I liked the most were my scratch and sniff and my fuzzy stickers, doubly so if they were fuzzy scratch and sniff. I used to love scratching and smelling the fruit ones and all the food ones and then when they came out with the ones that smelled bad like foot and skunk, I smelled those too. Those were crazy! I didn’t keep any of those because I thought they would contaminate my book. Recently we were in whole foods and they had a sheet of scratch and sniff stickers as a give away. It was awesome there was hotdog and popcorn and strawberry and some others.
It is well known that smell is one of the strongest connections to memory and those scratch and sniff stickers triggered memories not just of the food chemicals they emulated but also the years and years of scratching stickers till they were all worn out. I am glad scratch and sniff is making a come back or at least in the whole foods by my house. I wonder where my sticker book is. I should look for it the next time I go home. I will make sure to post pictures if I do find it.