I distinctly remember the smell of my grandparents' house. It's an old house smell that's hard to describe, a combination of old wood and old carpet and old plaster and old furniture. It sounds unpleasant, but really it's not. 'Old' should not be equated to 'bad', although it often is in our society.
A couple of times over the last few decades I've caught whiffs of this scent in other places, and each time it has whiplashed me back to that elegant house on Lake Harriet Boulevard. I wish I could bottle that smell.
There are also several tastes that bring me back to that house. One is bread-and-butter pickles, which Grandma would serve in crystal pickle dishes at the dinner table. Another is oatmeal cookies. Grandma would make oatmeal cookies and give them to me as a sweet treat. I think she put pecans in them too, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
Yesterday I made a large batch of oatmeal cookies. The recipe I used said it would make 18 cookies, and since I was making enough to bring to O and E, I decided to triple it. The 18 cookies from the recipe must be gargantuan, because I ended up with about 80 cookies. We'll be eating them for weeks. Cookies for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not that the kids would complain, of course.
One bite from those cookies and I'm back at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Once again I'm eight years old, sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, looking out the window and watching the birds eat from Grandpa's suet feeder.
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| The house on Lake Harriet |
Thank you for this! Brought me right back to their house! Ahhh...the smells! I remember playing with Grandma's dolls from inside her china cabinet...the smell when I opened those doors... I had to smile at your memory of the bird feeder tho...remember how grandpa would zap the "ugly" birds?!
ReplyDeleteYes, I felt so bad for the squirrels!! Does Grandma's doll shelf still smell like that?
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