August 22, 2001
Proustian olfactory
flashbacks
and
hoisting steins at Oktoberfest
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Today is my
niece's birthday. Lauren turned 12 today and we helped her
celebrate by participating in another great trail ride into the
Hiawatha National Forest near Pete's Lake with Mike and Mary Blough.
What a great ride!
If you haven't
already done so, please take a look at the new Activities page.
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Bicyclists were
passing me on both sides, and I wasn't paying much attention until
suddenly a woman rode past wearing some sort of lemon perfume.
And in a split second I was in one of those Proustian olfactory
flashbacks, twenty-five or so years before, in the kitchen of one of
my aunts, with her many children, my cousins, on a hot summer's
day. I was the eldest, at eight or so, and my aunt and uncle
had just gotten divorced. She was sad and worried, and I think
to soothe herself and help her wounded ego, she had done a little
retail therapy: she'd gone to the store and spent several dollars on
a lemonade-making contraption.
Of course, it
goes without saying that to make lemonade, all you need is a
pitcher, a lemon-juice squeezer, ice cubes, water, lemons, and
sugar. That's all. Oh, and a long spoon. But my
aunt was a little depressed, and this lemonade-making thing must
have seemed like something that would be fun and would maybe hydrate
her life a little, filling her desiccated spirit with nice, cool,
sweet lemonade. The contraption consisted of a glass pitcher,
with a lemon squeezer that fit on top and that had a holding tank
for the lemon juice. What you did was to fill the pitcher with
water and ice cubes and sugar, then put the squeezer - with its
holding tank - on top, squeeze a bunch of lemons, then pour the
lemon juice from the holding tank into the pitcher. Finally,
you got your long spoon and stirred. The lemon googe and seeds
stayed on top in the juice squeezer. The whole thing was very
efficient, but if you thought about it too long, totally stupid,
too.
So there we were
in the kitchen, the five cousins and me, crowded around her at the
sink as she proudly made us lemonade. She put the cold water
in the pitcher, added ice cubes, lots of sugar, put the juicer lid
on top, squeezed a dozen lemons, and then began to take glasses down
from the cupboards. Wait! we older ones wanted to cry out, you
haven't poured in the lemon juice. Stop! Mistakes are being
made! But she got out jelly glasses, plastic glasses, a couple
of brilliant aluminum glasses, and poured seven servings.
There we were, six anxious black-belt co-dependents, unable to
breathe, with a longing for everything to be Okay and for her not to
feel sad anymore. She raised her glass to us as a toast, and
we all took sips of our sugary ice water, and my aunt's hands were
so lemony from cutting and squeezing all those lemons that she must
have tasted lemon. We all stared at her helplessly as we drank
our sugar water, then smiled and raised our glasses like we were
doing a soft-drink commercial, and held them out for more.
I perfectly
remembered, there on the salt marsh, the crummy linoleum on my
aunt's kitchen floor, graying beige speckled with black, and how it
wore away to all black near the sink, and how at its most worn
place, rotten wood showed through. And how all those cousins,
some so young they must have thought ice-cold sugar water was about
as good as the getting got, stood at the sink with us older kids, in
a ring around my aunt. And how close I felt to them all, how
much a part of the wheel.
It touches me so
deeply, the poignancy of the crummy linoleum, of my aunt's pain and
her pride in her lemonade-making machine, of all the ways in which
we try to comfort ourselves, of her wanting to make us better
lemonade, of us wanting to make her better, the enthusiasm with
which we drank and held out our glasses, as if we were hoisting
steins at Oktoberfest.
- Ann Lamott
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