Some smells or aromas will evoke a memory from me among other things.
Whenever I smell a certain pleasant smell I think of my grandparents house from long ago. It's a warm, cozy feeling I get. Makes me long for some of Grandma's crepes or noodles and cabbage!
I was 8. It was 1967. The aroma of stuffed cabbage (halupki) and kielbasa and perogies would permeate my Grandmother's kitchen. Whatever she put in the broth to boil the cabbage, I will never know....but I can still smell its wonder 58 years later. I am 66. On Friday nights my parents would drop me off at "Grammy and TaTa's" house. They would come get me at around noon on Saturday, since neither of my Grandparents ever learned to drive. Back then, they didn't have to . The city they lived in had busses, trolleys, trains galore. My Eastern European grandad bought his house with money saved under the mattress; he would never trust banks.
I would arrive armed with my portable record player; it folded up like a suitcase, remember those? We would play 78s that they had -- all kinds of wonderful lost songs from the 1930s and 1940s. My Grandad, a Giants fan before they left for California, would be drinking a Rheingold beer, or two, or three, and watching this new team called the Mets. My Grandma would be singing some ancient song in the kitchen...its strings still reverberate in my heart. The tomatoes were fresh from the garden. The bread? baked from scratch in the oven hours before. When doused in garlic, it became the nectar of the Gods.
If the phone rang, My Grandma would always know who it was "based on the ring."
One hot, sultry Friday night in the hot, sticky summer of 1967 it was Aunt Janie; her son, my much older cousin, was killed in Vietnam.
It was 1967. Times were changin. We all cried that night. It was heartfelt. My Grandma said, "Now, you, Philip, you do not go off to war when you grow up. Say NO."
I felt as if I were in a comfortable cocoon. I was somehow protected.
To this day, if I smell cabbage boiled just the right way, with proper ingredients, I enter a time machine and I am transformed back to a place I can only call heaven. I have been searching for heaven ever since.
