Over 40 years ago, my grandparents built a vacation house near a natural spring where a pool complex was built. A month ago, I took my son there to have a fun day. They’d renovated parts of it since I was last there. The entrance we always used was different, they removed a lot and added even more, but the skeleton was still the same. When the chlorine hit me, the smell teleported me somewhere I hadn’t been in years.

My granddad used to take my brother and me to that pool five days a week. I was there every summer from when I was a baby. They’d pick me up on the last day of school and not return me until the Sunday before Monday morning. Before I started school, the stays were even longer.

I resemble my granddad more than anyone else in the family. Physically, but also in the gestures, the way I move when I talk, the expressions on my face when I'm thinking. And the character underneath all of it

I have no specific memories of my granddad actually at the pool. I know we behaved like idiots, tried to drown each other, and that he’d get angry when it went too far. I have one or two flashes of him at the edge in his swim trunks, but they could be reconstructed from photos. The smell of chlorine didn’t bring back any of that. What it brought back was a feeling I can only call cozy. The fact of having been there.

While buying tickets at the entrance, I remembered there used to be a café that sold ice cream. The space had been gutted and rebuilt as a souvenir shop. But the smell of that area, somehow, was the same. Sweet, mixed with the chlorine drift from the pool through the doorways. We weren’t broke as a family, but ice cream was rare enough that going into that café was a small event. The smell brought that back too. Same coziness. Same sense of having had something I didn’t think to value at the time.

Smell stores things that conscious memory doesn’t bother with. You don’t decide to remember a smell or curate it. It just stays, and when it comes back, it brings the feeling that wrapped around what happened.

What that means, I think, is that some part of me had already decided what mattered. The smell that survived isn’t the smell of anything dramatic. The wild play didn’t make the cut. The fights with my brother didn’t. What made the cut was the smell of a place where I’d been loved without having to ask for it, and where the people I loved were nearby without me having to think about it. The smell kept the belonging. The events ended up in conscious memory or didn’t, decided by something unconscious.

I couldn't have told you any of this when I was eight or sixteen. I would have told you I wanted more ice cream and more pool time. Belonging wasn't a concept I had access to. It was the state I was in. The smell teleports me back to a time when I didn't have to be aware of it.

My granddad has been gone for 30 years. The resemblance is what people use to talk about him. I always thought of the resemblance as physical, which it mostly is. What I understood at the pool that day, breathing the same chlorine that had been around him decades before me, is that the resemblance goes further than the face and the hands. I’m carrying the feeling of him too, stored somewhere that doesn’t show up in any photo. The smell brought it forward. The smell was the door.

My son was splashing around two meters away while I was figuring this out. He’s three. Most likely, he won’t remember the day, or the chlorine, or whatever is in that renovated café space now. Some other small thing is being stored in him right now that neither of us is paying attention to. He’ll smell something fifteen years from now and stop walking for a second and not know exactly why.