Why, when I inhale certain fragrances, am I pow! all at once transported back in time?
Scientifically, I really can't say. Data rarely moves my thinking. All I'm sure of is this: everything that defines "Thanksgiving" for me will stem from a scent. In particular, a food scent. Each wedging a precise memory from the inner layers that shape my life.
Which isn't to say all remembering is light-hearted. Sometimes the only thing that stands between a mind and a scent is pain. If so, inhaling will hurt far more than hearing or seeing. And the ache doesn't alter with the passing years. Something so essential never changes one bit.
All of which leads me back to when I was 5, when my family moved from the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan to the spacious suburban dream: a split-level house at the end of a New England cul-de-sac where lawns were suddenly as level as the sidewalks left behind. It took only one nightfall to grasp how absolutely dark a sky could grow, and that my bike could stay outside overnight and no one would steal it. To a city kid this was big.
My father proclaimed we were "moving up." Up to where?, I wondered. A child's life is so literal.
My mother's response was to cling. By the age of 30 she'd left Italy for Little Italy, and Little Italy for the suburbs. Cooking was her lifeline. So while the kids in my new school ate bologna sandwiches as homogenized as the mayonnaise between slices, I spooned pasta fagioli out of a steamy thermos. What was once my favorite meal now horrified me. I took to throwing my lunch away rather than suffer the taunting that sausage and peppers would surely attract.
The smell of garlic will forever remind me of the cloves my mother peeled and chopped by hand until her Ball jar was brimming. To this day, all of me comes through that smell in a pang of guilt because I would never, ever help her. I didn't want my fingers to smell like hers, the odor accompanying her wherever she went. I now realize it wasn't my help she needed so much as my presence to ease the solitude her days had surely become. In contrast to apartment living, she had a larger, more dazzling home. But in all ways that matter to a woman used to company and chatter, a smaller life.
And if that isn't enough of a guilt trip, one whiff of the pungent bulb and my father is praising "the Old Country" as I roll my eyes and run off, palms pressed to my ears. Like the language he spoke, his history was too alien to be my history. I didn't want to think about the past. What child does? In a matter of a few suburban weeks I'd migrated from the emotional culture of my family to that of Middle America.
So, mixed with every waft of garlic is not only the arrogance of youth, but the ever-presence of a glacially slow process of self-forgiveness as I try to humor myself back to the current me.
Funny how time does change everything. Yesterday I minced enough garlic to fill my own jar, and once I got through the discomfort it roused, I felt comfort, a feeling I wish I could get at more often. And when my husband asked how long it took to chop so much garlic by hand, it occurred to me my answer had little to do with the minutes or hours he referred to. "A lifetime," I said.
Mary Lou Sanelli resides in Lower Queen Anne. Her latest book is "Craving Water."
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