I was walking in the street on the way to have lunch. The street was cleaned up by cutting down the wild plants around the road. I reached near the bundle of plants cut down, which had a huge smell. It evoked some of my childhood memories, which were vague. There were lots of wild plants around my house. We usually cut those plants before summer. The smell might be triggering memories associated with those days. I stood near the bundle for a couple of minutes to see whether I could recall any of my childhood incidents or scenes associated with those days, but I couldn’t. There are several memories in our minds. Our memory may not be accurate. Even if you can retrieve the memory accurately, you can't understand it the same way you understood the time it was stored since you would interpret it with your current perspective, not with the perspective you had when it was stored. How to retrieve our memories? The key is to find out the cues which were associated with those memories. It could be a smell, visual, word, story etc. If anything in your day to day activity triggers your memory, spend some time to reflect on it. Ask where you first got that smell, visual, word, or story. Then try to expand the things around it, which could help to retrieve the memory associated with it.