Me with Nana and Pap in Florida
When we’re little, adults often tell us how much we will miss certain people or times when they are gone, and of course, we can’t possibly understand what they mean even when we are a tad bit more introspective than the average child.
We just can’t.
Until we do.
And then it’s heartbreaking.
There are moments in the last few years in particular (is it something about turning 50?) that it hits me (really HITS me) that I will never see or be around my nana, for example, ever again. That that was it. I can’t sit with these feelings for very long. They could easily become overwhelming in a negative way.
For me, a lot of these realizations come with a deep desire to smell something again. Weird, right? But then so much of our memory is tied to smell.
My Great Aunt Ardelle’s house smelled a very specific way. When I used to have a bricks and mortar studio in Erie, it was mere feet from where her house once stood, and once in a while, that scent would be on the wind. It would take my breath away — the flood of memory and the longing.
My papa smelled of fresh cut wood and coffee made in a percolator. My nana smelled of bread, sticky buns, fresh squeezed orange juice, and too many others to list. Together they smelled of Florida to me (even though they lived in Erie for a very long time) and sometimes the weather even in Ohio will make me say to Craig, “It smells like Florida after a brief rain…” and he says, Huh, not really understanding.
My grandmother on the other side smelled of church basements and gladiolas and a scent I can’t name that floated around anything she sewed.
Back to my Great Aunt, she smelled of the old school Oil of Olay which you can’t get anymore… I’ve tried. They’ve changed it too much. And she smelled of Mr. Bubble bubble bath which my sister and I would take in her giant clawfoot tub.
My Great Aunt and Nana both smelled of Christmas… well, the way I want Christmas to smell anyway and a way that it will never again. (And just writing that made me cry.)
There are other scents tied to grade school, especially the little round school I went to in State College for 2nd grade. There’s the smell of waxy crayons and sand from when we’d make those bizarre bits of art with colored sand in baby food jars. (Do you remember those?)
There’s the smell of fresh fallen leaves that every October takes me back to early grade school and certain long ago friends.
There’s the smell of plastic barbie dolls and Christmas gift baby dolls that came every year.
There’s the smell of the cheap paperbacks from Scholastic books and the newsprint that was the order form.
But mostly, to my point, it’s the smells around those people who were our whole worlds when we were little, so many of whom we’ve already said goodbye to.
When we’re little, we just can’t know. I think we’re built that way on purpose. The knowledge of so much coming heartache could easily steal joy from the little people we were … as yet unequipped to process that kind of loss and still so full of trust that it all will just go on and on…