I know why this is: it’s because my mom, the only family member that I was close with, smoked a whole bunch, and so I have positive childhood associations.
Whether it be the active smell of somebody who’s smoking nearby or the lingering scent that’s left or that sticks around in place where people smoke frequently, such as bars or hallways or similar, I like it a lot.
Yet even so, I was actually stunned when I found that there are very few people who agree, and many are the folks who think that it smells bad.
It’s definitely nostalgic for me, since one set of grandparents smoked when I was a kid. It never really bothered me…unless I was driving in their car, where it would give me motion sickness. I was never prone to it otherwise; only when driving on mountain roads in a car that reeked of cigarettes.
To their credit, they quit smoking when my older sister had her first kid, but the smell of cigarettes just throws me back to the summers spent helping Grandpa with whatever home improvement project he was working on.