Notes from Maine - 2023/04/09
Down in Virginia, my mother is hosting her Easter Egg Hunt today. It’s one of her big annual events. Some years, it’s quite large. I don’t know what the typical turnout is these days. It’s been a while since I made the trip down. They have a big spread of food, tons of kids, and people mill around the yard talking until the hunt begins. When the party is over, my mother has a special closet above her garage (The Easter Closet) where she packs away all the decorations until next year.
Up here, my biggest concern is laundry detergent. I used to always do my laundry on Sunday, and two years in a row I ran out of detergent before Easter Sunday. With all the stores closed, I couldn’t wash. The following Monday, I had to get pretty creative with my wardrobe choices. When I had an office job, I only really had enough clothes to make it through the week. Choices just create decisions that have to be made. I had five work shirts and no choices. Now, I do laundry whenever the mood strike me, and I don’t have an office to go to tomorrow. Still, I always worry about having enough laundry detergent on Easter Sunday.
Speaking of resurrection, I’m kinda hoping that my lilac out next to the fence pull through. I hesitated over typing that possessive adjective “my” in front lilac. In what sense are they mine? I didn’t plant them, and I haven’t done anything to encourage their growth. They live on a patch of soil that I pay taxes for, but I don’t think that makes them mine. This winter, Earl and Maybelle ate a lot of the bark from the branches. With tons of hay just yards away, the horses claimed the lilac bark as theirs. Once the damage was done, I adjusted the fence to keep them away. I have no idea if the lilac will come back or not.
When I was a little kid, we had a scratch-and-sniff book. The more popular scents had been scratched to oblivion by my older siblings. You could still get a hint of orange from one page. My favorite, by far, was the lilac. The scent was a good facsimile of the real thing and it always made me feel serene, but I couldn’t use it too often. If you scratched it twice in a row, you barely got anything from it. You had to wait a bit—maybe close the book until tomorrow—and then you could smell the lilac again. Our neighbors down the street had a mimosa tree. When that flowered, I was transported. The silky petals would tickle my nose. Again, those flowers had their limits. They smelled best the first time I encountered a flower each year, with diminishing returns each successive time.
A couple of weeks ago, after an unsuccessful trip to Lowes, I decided to treat myself to some Burger King french fries. When the drive-thru window opened, perfume wafted out—so thick that it stung my eyes. My change was infused with the odor. It was so pungent that I couldn’t keep that money in the house. I gave it to a friend in a ziplock baggie. Seriously. I know it sounds like I’m being dramatic, but you could smell this money from twenty feet away. My nose isn’t even that sensitive, but I was having trouble enjoying meals in my kitchen.
I don’t care about wrinkles on my face, thinning and graying hair, or even sagging skin, but I would love to have my childhood sense of smell and taste back for a day. We thrash and abuse our senses over decades until hardly anything registers anymore. As a kid, I remember being overwhelmed by different flavors and scents. It would be interesting to experience that again, although I suspect it would mostly be unpleasant.
When I was a teenager, my father had a house with a TV room in the basement. On Sundays I would sit down there trying to finish my homework while we watched football. If it was cold, he would start a fire in the fireplace. The chimney had no draft and the room would fill with smoke. Barely able to see the game through the haze of woodsmoke, Dad would light a cigarette. That was “normal” to me as a kid. I guess it makes sense that smells were overwhelming to me back then. My nose was working overtime to filter out everything. Gasoline with lead was still available, fire retardant chemicals were being applied to every fabric (they still are, as far as I know), and there was so much indoor smoke that leftover paint in the can didn’t match the walls after a week or two.
Sometimes my thoughts wander as I’m putting them down. I guess what I’m trying to say is, Happy Easter if you celebrate. If you don’t, happy Sunday!
