I learned to cook in the Olde Cast Iron Skillet. I could fry my own bacon and eggs as soon as I could do so without burning off my nose. I used one of those old 2 step step stools with a seat.
Had to remember to pick out all the little bits of egg or bacon that might come off. Plus if Mom needed a small smatter of grease for something, strait out of the pan. She would gimme heck if she found any leftovers in the pan.
Mom rarely dumped the bacon grease. If it got too full Mom would put it in a clean jar and save. Once in a while something would burn and she would pour that in the old coffee can under the sink. Rinse with hot water, maybe rub it down with an old green scratcher. Re season if needed. Put some saved bacon grease back in.
Something I haven’t seen or smelled in years, Milkweed. We had a 30’ fence just covered in it. Prolly gave my neighbor a hemorrhage every fall when I cracked the pods open and sent the seeds flying.
I spent hours today in a park that had large arbors covered with wisteria. The scent kept reaching me at odd moments as I walked around the park, taking me back in little flashes to my childhood home, where there was a huge arbor covered with wisteria vines only a few feet from my bedroom window.
Before I left the park, I sat under one of the arbors for a few minutes, just breathing in that scent.
The smell of wood smoke on the breeze on a cold fall/winter day. We heated the farm house with wood, and walking up the driveway from school you’d smell the smoke coming down the valley before you saw the house.
I listened to a spring training game on the radio (well over the internet, but it was the radio feed.) I used to spend all Sunday afternoon listening to a double header in the background as I did homework or chores. They could play two games in those days starting at 1 and be finished by 5 sometimes.
Seeing forsythia bushes and spiarea(sp?) bushes blooming. Reminds me of my grandparents and how grandma knew all the plants. Also drinking Dr. Pepper, Grandpa used to give me and my sister our own (glass!) bottle, and we didn’t have to share!
The smell of chocolate chip cookies baking reminds me of my Grandma Annie’s (not my grandmother - my uncle’s grandmother but I loved her) and wandering up and down her sidewalk dressed in her clothes, or digging in her cast iron pots for dinosaur bones. Using my mom’s sheet cake pan give me wonderful memories of making cherry glop (a 70’s excuse of cheesecake involving pie filling, cool whip and cream cheese).
Peonies reminds me of my aunt’s garden in the summer and family dinners with my mom and all our extended family. Having moved to a different state, I miss that.
Unfortunately my mom gave me her old dining table. I want to take an ax to it and burn it on the lawn, but I won’t because that’s illegal. What I remember everytime I see that table (which is every day) is hiding under it while my mom and dad screamed at each other over the phone about alimony.
One is driving as the sun rises - when we were kids, our “vacations” were day trips that would start really early. So being on the road as night turns to day brings back memories of a pile of kids in the back of the station wagon on the way to an adventure!
The other is sweet cherries. They remind me of of being a little kid sitting on the back step at my grandmother’s house eating cherries and spitting out the pits.
No - after you’ve gone swimming, you get canned ravioli headed over a propane burner! At least, that’s how it worked at the place my grandparents had on the river.
Notice how most of the posts have to do with an odor? This is not a coincidence.
For me, it’s auto exhaust. When I was a tyke, we had an ice cream truck that would come through the neighborhood a couple times a week. It was a Willy’s Overland with a freezer box in the back and we would cluster around the right rear corner, right where the exhaust pipe was, when the guy would be rooting through the tiny door in the side for a treat.
A hibiscus bush. When I was very young, there was one planted outside my bedroom window. It had bright yellow flowers, which I would pick and play with, pretending they were dolls with bright yellow gowns.
The bush was later supplanted with something else, some bush that was not half as much fun.
I grew up in the Pacific NW, but pretty much all of my extended family remained in Mississippi & Arkansas so as a little kid I spent a fair bit of time there hanging with the cousins, feeding ticks, transporting chiggers from here to there, and hunting bullfrogs with shotguns. Good times, even the chiggers because I liked the minty smell of the medicine we’d put on them. 20+ years later I was having one of the worst days of my life in Basic training in S. Carolina. I was at a point where the only thing that kept me moving was sheer force of will–I was physically and mentally spent. We had been given a period of time to take a break from the toil of the day and I flopped down next some bushes and was immediately overcome with the fragrance of honeysuckle. I’m pretty sure I physically vanished for a few minutes as I was thrown into the easier days of my childhood romping through the wilderness without a care in the world. It was a very welcome break, and turned me around for the remainder of Basic. I can’t get the stuff to grow for more than a season in Colorado, regrettably. Too dry, and too cold in the winter I guess.
