Thursday night, I was running late after writing the weekly letters to Genius and The Pony. Not so much late for ME, but late for a "normal" (as Hick terms it) person's perception of a nightly routine. I had some financial business to attend, prior to my Friday trip to town. It was around 2:30 a.m. when I left my OPC (Old People Chair) and headed across the basement to the workshop for a rendezvous with one of the three safes. No, we don't have that many valuables. Hick has a fondness for safes.
Anyhoo, I walked past the base of the stairs, where that headless man had appeared to me one night many years ago, past the pool table, and reached for the door to the workshop. I noticed a smell. You know how it goes. A smell can take you right back to a certain period in your life.
This was my grandma's smell. Not perfume or hairspray, but the smell of her house. The house I lived next door to for five years, and also her last house, where we went to visit on Sunday evenings. It's not a recognizable scent to anybody else. Nothing identifiable, just a combination of Grandma's stuff. You wouldn't recognize you were smelling it when you walked in, but later it hits you, that's Grandma's house!
This grandma was my dad's mom. She loved to read, just like me, and had a basement full of books when I lived next door. An attic full of books in her last house. I was her oldest grandchild, named for her only daughter, who died in infancy from an infection. Not just the first name. All three names! I didn't know that until I saw the nameplate from her grave when I was about 10. It was on my grandpa's workbench (he was polishing it, I guess) when I walked past to get to the basement "library."
Anyhoo...not trying to be morbid. Just pointing out my connection with Grandma.
So...when I got a whiff of that Grandma smell at 2:30 a.m., I was a little surprised. It was a pleasant memory, and I went into the workshop and got my materials out of the safe. The smell was gone, once I went through the workshop door. Yet when I stepped back out, it was still there.
OH! Stupid me! Right beside the workshop door is a piano. We got it from Grandma's house after she died. It had been on her back porch at the next-door house, a closed-in back porch where she also kept a refrigerator with sodas for the grandkids, and then in the living room of her last house. The piano originally came out of my 2nd grade elementary school auditorium, when it was torn down for a playground when a new building was put up. Grandma was on the school board then, and I suppose she bid on the piano.
Anyhoo...it dawned on me that I was smelling that Grandma's-house scent because I was standing right beside the piano that had been in her house for years! DUH! I leaned over, put my nose nearly on the wood of that piano, for a better memory.
There was no smell to the piano.
Nothing. It was like sniffing a plain old rock. No smell at all. Huh. We've had that piano in our house for at least 8 years. Maybe 10. I've never gotten a whiff of Grandma's-house smell from it before. I wonder if I'll get one from it again. Maybe in a few years, for my birthday week.
Just like this time.
All grandparents homes have a grandparent smell. I've been working to develop mine for years.
ReplyDeleteI think you had a visitor.
I wonder if my house smells like Diet Coke and slaw. I hope to visit my kids from the afterlife, just to let them know they're not off the hook yet!
DeleteThat's a nice way to bring forth old memories. I don't know what my house smells like, apart from Old. All these older housing trust places have housed a lot of people in their time, so the mingling of smells is just classed under Old. If anything of mine is overlaying or adding, I can't tell.
ReplyDeleteI think joeh is right, your grandma came to check in and say hi.
Yes, memory smells, like the cheese I used to get, that had an herb that reminded me of picking blackberries in a field with my mom and grandma.
DeleteI think I like the smelly kind of visits, rather than battery-operated candles lighting up on their own after years of dormancy!
You may not notice the smell, but I'm sure your kids will remember it.
I read that the "Old people smell" is real. I guess I know what it is. My 118 yo old house had a smell to other people, "like my grandmother's house" they said. I never smelled it. I just smelled old wood. I like the old smell.
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I don't know what's going on with this spacing...
DeleteYes, that smell did have a wood component to it, which made me think of the piano sitting right there. Which didn't even smell like wood!
After my mom died, I brought home some boxes of photos and stuff. Put them in my sewing room. One day I decided it was time to look through the boxes. Opened the door and there was the smell of Mom's house. I know what you mean.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's something you don't notice day-to-day, but is apparent when you've spent time (maybe years!) without it. Even though enough time has passed that the smell should have dissipated.
DeleteYou had a visitor. I believe you did.
ReplyDeleteSeems like it to me. The actual smell would have been long-gone from that piano after all those years. Or I would have smelled it all along when walking past there, or not at all, from being used to it.
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