Scents of memory

Unannounced, the scent of Old English polish on the wooden banister in our Kentucky homeplace comes to mind. Again, I slide my hand down the sturdy rail and leap over the last few steps to the landing. A sense of belonging to my homeplace and family gently overwhelms me.

Perhaps I dreamt the leap. True or not, still, the memory and scent provoke one another to remembrance. They comfort me when lonely and weak. They repeat, “You will always belong to your family. Hold onto its rail. Leap.”

The memory and scent of my father’s aftershave possess similar power. Although I can’t remember the brand, I still hear my barber father slapping his face with the tonic. Growing up in a small house with his five girls and wife, our tiny bathroom provided the only male little grooming time and privacy.

Now, my mother’s small kitchen is the place where she cooked and baked a plethora of scents and memories. The aroma of her famous oatmeal, raisin, walnut cookies, hot from the oven, holds my primary food memory. I’d say her skillet cornbread with perfectly browned top and bottom, pulled from the oven’s heat and turned onto a plate, contends with her oatmeal cookies.

Yet, the fillings and crowns in my mouth testify to the truth that Mom’s oatmeal cookies confirmed me as a sweet-tooth early in life.

Thus, faithful to my preference, when a newlywed, I baked Mom’s oatmeal cookies in the little oven in our apartment for my groom and me. As the oven had no temperature control and thermostat, the cookies looked and tasted nothing like Mom’s. Eventually, when renting a townhouse with a working oven, I mastered Mom’s delicious oatmeal cookies.

I packed two cookies in Mel’s bagged lunches. Later, when school age, I packed two cookies with our daughters’ lunches.

Eventually, chocolate chip with walnut cookies replaced oatmeal cookies in my cookie jar. It’s puzzling how something so delicious falls from fashion. We humans can be fickle.

However, it is Mom’s oatmeal cookie and her remarkable pies that grounds me to my childhood. The memory and scent of her fruit pies baking in the oven also persuade me to use the fruit of season to roll out pie crusts and preheat the oven. My father also loved Mom’s pies. I’m not aware of his favorite. Like my husband and me, Dad devoured all her fruit pies.

Dear Reader, this morning, six months after his death, I pass the doorway of my husband’s abandoned bathroom. Unannounced, the scent of Dior’s Man of Aron cologne mingled with Ralph Lauren’s Polo, gently greets me-as it has for decades.

I pause at the top of the steps in the house the love of my life and I built together the fall of l988 and took occupancy February 1989, my fortieth birthday. I breathe in his scent, hold onto the rail and descend the stairs. Considerably older than when my family lived in our homeplace, I leap over the two bottom steps, only in my mind.

Contact Iris at irisfarmletters@gmail.com