Come to Your Senses: Smell
He slides the red checkered lid off the glass jar and whiffs, deeply.
“Pot!”
His classmates laugh.
He passes the jar, all part of a light-hearted exercise to have them smell herbs in jars, free associate memories and share the best stories. For a time, I only hear the jars clinking on desks, hands screwing lids open and shut.
Inhaling.
The “pot” is a classic Italian blend from my kitchen of rosemary, thyme and bay leaf, but that fact isn’t all that important. If the process unleashes a flashback to smoking a blunt, I’ll take it.
My college students often arrive numb, eyes blank, cellphones in hand, shoulders bent like commas towards their desks. There’s so much “muchness” in their lives of jobs and five classes; they struggle to be in any given moment too fully, a state essential to good creative work. The jars of spices work a bit like a cigarette, the nicotine of memory kicking in even if they don’t want it to. They must learn to lean in, take in, process.
The lanky Jamaican American guy who joked about pot now has cinnamon in hand. He doesn’t know that, since I did not label the jars, but he’s somewhere else now, no longer bantering. The women in his group chatter about cookies, holidays, other feel-good cinnamon moments. One loves the Cinnamon Dolce Latte at Starbucks.
I move from group-to-group asking them about the narratives streaming in their minds, driven and woken by smell. His story “wins” most-interesting in his group.
“Each summer I return to Jamaica to visit my mom’s mom. We take a long dangerous road into the mountains.”
We hear of men laying in wait to rob them, of bird songs unlike anything back in the states, of thrumming insects and lush foliage along a rutted, impossible road.
We inhale.
He continues.
His grandma awaits on the porch, her face framed by her colorful dress.
In the kitchen she has a cinnamon curry stewing.
This is not a Christmas cookie story.
Instead, he speaks of his other life with cousins and kin in the mountains of Jamaica, of swims in streams and soccer games on dirt patches and a free-spirited, homey feeling he never carries inside him in the U.S.
But each August he leaves the cinnamon land behind for school in Connecticut and the chance for better work.
Another woman in the class shares her stories of visiting the Dominican Republic for the first time when she was eight to see her father’s family.
Habichuelas con dulce.
The Spanish rings like a lovely bell from her tongue.
In a confessional tone, she tells us she actually doesn’t know Spanish, but there in the Dominican Republic with her father’s family eating the sweet creamy bean dish with cinnamon sticks, she feels rooted. Her relatives swirl around her like an aroma from the kitchen and unlike anything she smells or feels in New England.
As we take this all in, one of the students asks what comes up for me when I open the jars. As I collect the cinnamon, Italian spice mix, curry and garlic, I laugh, and tell them instead of pot, I smell Irish Breakfast Tea. As a child, the large Irish American family across the street often brought me to Catholic church services with them and we always swung by their father’s mother’s house. Grammy was a small, white-haired Irish woman who still spoke Gaelic. She’d offer up hot cups of Irish Breakfast Tea with honey and milk and a warmed Entenmann’s pecan coffee cake, the sugar frosting sticky wet against my fingers.
And none of the jars deliver my favorite memory—of oranges squeezed into pulp, the juice poured by my mother into a bowl of confectionary sugar and butter to make orange juice frosting. She was too busy to be an excellent cook, but she made kickass orange juice frosted cupcakes. The sweet tangy blend of the frosting mixed so perfectly with the soft yellow cake surrounded by crinkly paper.
At this point, I am sitting on the desk, my long legs dangling, my dress shoes just touching the floor. My legs sway a bit, like a girl on a swing.
The jars are sealed now but their lingering scents continue to draw out our shared immigration stories and our love for family. For a moment it feels as though we are all swimming in the mountains of Jamaica.
