Season to Taste (10 page)

In the following days, I returned to the kitchen with new purpose. I filled the empty daylight hours with tufts of flour that rose from the counter like clouds. Beginning with an almond cake, a pumpkin pie, and a mountain of chocolate pecan cookies, I tried my hand at fresh pita bread and dimply rounds of whole wheat. I pulled a loaf of French lemon bread encrusted in a sweet maple frosting one evening just as my mother arrived home from work. “It smells delicious in here,” she said with a sigh.

I found that if I followed recipes with precision, my baked goods would be deemed a success, scarfed up by the smiling mouths of family and friends. If I was experimental or sloppy in my execution, however, the results grew brittle and stale on the counter. I no longer had the ability to draw the line between bland and delicious, so I measured my cups of flour and teaspoons of salt with care. At the Craigie Street Bistrot, I had been learning to leave recipes behind, to rely on myself and my senses. No longer able to trust my own intuition, I returned to the written word, the carefully recorded cups and tablespoons and ounces. While improvisation in the kitchen had brought excitement to the stove, a sexy creativity impossible while under the rule of recipe, at least my slow-rising loaves of bread brought the same enjoyment to the table in the end.
This will do,
I thought.
For now.

I began to cook savory dishes, too. I attempted simple things, meals that I assumed wouldn’t require me to taste so much as I went along. My head bent close to the stove, I watched the meat brown and listened to the sauce reduce with a burble. But I missed all reference to spice and herb, to nuance and depth. I couldn’t balance the individual flavors in my mouth.

“Your cooking is . . . erratic,” my mother said with a kind smile on her face one night over dinner. We were eating pasta with sheep’s milk yogurt, Parmesan cheese, and a slew of slivered onions that I had cooked down to a sweet caramel brown. This was a dish that Becca and I had cooked weekly when we were in college, so charmed by its warmth, rich with onions in butter and tangy with dairy. I watched my mother take one bite before pushing it casually away to concentrate on her salad. “It needs . . . something,” she said when I asked her what was wrong. I tensed in my seat. Suddenly, I was angry. “What?” I yelled. “What does it need?” The words exploded from my mouth. I pushed back my chair and grabbed my crutches. She apologized but I wouldn’t hear it. I dragged myself back toward the stairs to my room, cursing under my breath.

IN THE FIRST WEEK
of November I shed my crutches. My left leg had withered away in the months it lay dormant and my unused muscles screamed in anticipation, but my doctor had given me clearance to bear weight on my injured knee. My father took me to a medical supply store near his house to pick out a cane.

“I’ll bet I’m the first person under the age of seventy to come here for one of these,” I said, eyeing my options. I chose the simplest: black, curved like the candy we once hung on our Christmas tree, shiny with a painted metal finish. I tested it out with a slow walk around the store, leaning heavily, using both hands, terrified of falling over. The cane clicked each time its stump hit the ground. My father helped me to climb back in the car.

I met Alex at the front door when he arrived the following afternoon. I smiled, proud to stand on both legs, but embarrassed that my expectations had fallen so far. “I feel like a grandmother,” I said, waving my cane, trying to shrug it off.

He laughed his familiar laugh. “You’re fine,” he said.

Alex had come over often since the accident. For this I was thankful. He provided respite to my loneliness, a companion for many of my long days at home. He made me laugh, reminded me to exercise the muscles of my smile.

Together in those weeks, we hadn’t done much. We watched television or just talked while lounging comfortably on the couch. We ate burritos bulging with guacamole and beans from a restaurant down the block and carved warped little faces into pumpkins for Halloween. On an evening in October he tucked my crutches and me in the front seat of his car and we drove to see a movie at a theater one town away. We were running late and I worried we would miss its start. When we parked, Alex jumped out and slammed his door shut. I could see him stymie an impulse to lope toward the theater a few blocks away. I was moving slowly, feeling guilty and trying to keep up. He gave an apologetic nod and I told him to run ahead with a point of my crutch. “No,” he said, sweeping my arms over his shoulders and lifting my body up behind him. Careful not to disturb my injured knee, he held me stable, piggyback style, and carried me all the way to the theater, my face pressed into his neck, holding on tight. We fell into our seats laughing right as the film began.

On that November day—my first full day without crutches, a brisk almost-winter New England afternoon—Alex and I climbed into his car and drove toward the suburbs where we both grew up. We parked in a lot across the street from the Old North Bridge, its wooden limbs the site of one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War. On nice days tourists flowed over its small berth, but to us it was just a bridge, a high school haunt only minutes from his home.

Alex turned off the engine and turned to look at me. He wore a thick black coat and a snowboarding hat over his bright red hair, which he had recently cut into a Mohawk that I feared if unsheathed would draw more stares than my cane. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes.” I pulled on my hat and my gloves. I hadn’t walked more than the length of my mother’s small house in the twenty-four hours since I left my crutches behind and as I stepped out of the car onto the frozen ground, I felt my stomach clenched in fear. I had forgotten how to balance myself unaided. I couldn’t remember how to bend my knee with each step.

“How do you walk again?” I asked with a nervous laugh, worried that I would fall on a patch of ice or that a gust of wind would flip me right over onto my side, brittle like a stick. But Alex stood close by as we walked step after aching step from the car to the bridge, a distance no longer than a football field but one that felt as if it extended for miles.

We passed over the bumpy, ice-encrusted landscape. My leg, still encased in the thick metal brace that ran from ankle to midthigh, felt weak. My cane seemed too thin to bear the weight of my body, and I moved stiffly. When my feet hit a patch of ice, Alex held on to my arm and guided me to solid ground. We arrived at the bridge, which hung low over the dark flow of water, and paused for a moment at its peak. The final rays of light cascaded through the bare limbs of the willowy trees near the river. I could see the first dusting of snow limp on their branches. Standing with Alex as the cold air whipped around my cheeks, it was easy to imagine this was a different time.

My high school friends and I had often driven to this spot. We would stand on the bridge, laughing and joking and relishing the freedom of not being at home. We walked through the woods and threw rocks in the pond. We weren’t particularly rebellious teenagers. We spent our time playing in the marching band at football games and watching movies at one another’s homes. We took swigs of the vodka stored in one parent or another’s liquor cabinets, giggling and unsure. But here we had just goofed around amid the scent of bark, of damp stone, of crisp running water.

Alex and I had come here in the beginning of our relationship, too, when we were shy high school juniors. In those bashful early days, we spent a lot of time wandering outside, the first blush of an “us” arriving alongside the scent of fallen leaves and freshly turned earth. A favorite spot of ours was the local arboretum, a lush park in the center of town, where we would walk on the gravel paths in the afternoon or lay on a blanket in the grass waiting for the stars to emerge in the early-autumn sky. I remember the scent of that field, green and sweet, breathless as we moved toward our first kiss.

Standing there on the Old North Bridge six years later, it struck me how painful it was to be close to Alex again. Despite the pleasure of his friendship, which had only blossomed again in the aftermath of the accident, he was my ex-boyfriend. He was my first love. I missed our easy relationship, the one that ebbed and flowed through high school and college and made me feel that I would always be loved. I missed skiing with him in the winter, running on backwoods trails with him in the summer. I missed the way he put his hand on the nape of my neck from the passenger seat while I drove.

What I missed most, however, was something that no longer existed. I missed the smell of his favorite T-shirt, which I had taken with me to my first semester of college and worn every night to bed, cuddling in its known odor of home. I missed the soft scent of his skin, salty after exercise and sleek after a shave. I missed the familiarity of his embrace, of his home, of the haunts of our past—the kind that only came with that textured depth of scent. Without smell, without that present and its tie to the past, I felt like I had lost part of him. Perhaps the most important part. Alex wasn’t Alex, really, without his smell. My memory of that person had been lost in the accident, too.

I looked back toward the car as we stood there silently. I measured the distance with my gaze. “I can’t believe I walked here,” I said, finally. “It looks like such a small distance.”

“You did good,” Alex said with a pat on my back. “You’ll be running again in no time.”

I STOOD AT
the kitchen counter with a cookbook and a knife and my cane balanced against the counter a week after I began to walk. The pain had receded, and I hardly thought twice when I moved back and forth from the stove.

I had been helping to cook dinner for my mother and Charley every night, happy to do something productive even if the results were at times bland. On this night we planned to roast a leg of lamb, which sat fleshy and fine in the fridge. I laid a thick bundle of fresh rosemary on a cutting board before me. I would pluck the pointed leaves, just as I had done nightly for Maws, and then chop them in order to flavor the marinade for the meat. I moved along in my work,
pluck pluck pluck
,
chop chop chop,
my knife rapid against herb and wood. I let my mind wander. I thought about culinary school, about Alex, about the memoir I had begun to read that morning, one about a woman in New York who cooked her way through every recipe in Julia Child’s first book. And then suddenly I stopped. I breathed in and out, slowly. There was something in the air. Something different. Something surprising and strange, something I couldn’t quite process, like I had entered a waking dream.

There was a smell.

Inhale.

Exhale.

It was there. Definitely something there.

Inhale.

Exhale.

This scent was light but undeniable. It entered my nose with purpose on each breath. It was shocking, like a burst of neon light in a landscape of black and white, and I stood there silently, unsure of what to do.

Could I be hallucinating?

Inhale.

Exhale.

It was still there, smelling of the woods. Of the ground. Of the earth. It smelled dark. A dark forest green. It smelled wonderful.

I looked down at my hands, which still held a knife in one and a bundle of herbs in the other.
Of course.
This was a scent, a real scent, the scent of rosemary. I leaned down over the cutting board and sucked in air slowly again through my nostrils. The aroma saturated my nose, and for a moment I could hardly breathe. I felt assaulted. Surprised and overwhelmed.

“I can smell this,” I said.

I looked around. There was no one in the room but me.

“I can SMELL this,” I said, louder.

I inhaled and exhaled again. It was still there. I could smell it!

It was pungent, rich and warm. Like a friend I hadn’t seen in years, this scent rang simultaneously familiar and strange. It tingled with possibility. I closed my eyes and breathed in again.

There it was. There what was? A thought? A memory? The aroma took me somewhere—somewhere as immediate as the sound of knife on herb. It took me back to my childhood: to a family vacation in Colorado, when I rode a horse for the first time on a trail littered in rosemary bush.

I put my hands to my face again and again. I could smell it there the entire night. The lingering scent on my fingertips gave me goose bumps of pleasure. It reminded me of my family, of my past. It reminded me of the freedom of summer and the breath of vacation. It reminded me of James Bond.

WHY? WHY DID
rosemary send me immediately back to that horse ride in Colorado? Why did salsa take me viscerally back to those Sunday evenings with my father when I smelled it before the accident? Why did the scent of sawdust ignite a memory of a rodeo out west and whiffs of cinnamon gum on a friend’s exhale a middle-school crush?

It is not all romance and English literature. It is grounded in science as well.

The perception of smell is directly linked to the amygdala and to the hippocampus, located in the medial temporal lobes of the brain. They are both considered gateways to the limbic system, which processes long-term memory, emotion, and behavior. Although hearing, vision, taste, and touch likewise provide input, olfaction is the only sense so intimately and immediately routed throughout. No wonder, then, that smells “detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences,” as Diane Ackerman writes in
A Natural History of the Senses
. “Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.” Complex, indeed.

So smell is tied to emotion through the broad hand of brain wiring. But what does that mean about specific memories? How does this surprising little sense tie itself to a place, a person, a day? It’s through something much less romantic than Proust and his madeleine: learning.

Memories are tied to scents the same way that reading Proust over and over taught my mother about the symbolic value of dreams, the same way that I could eventually recall the definitions to Italian grammar words on my flash cards without having to turn them over to look. Smells are associated with specific events, people, and places because we learn them that way.