May 11, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

You walk down a street, and there is a whiff of early summer but not oppressive heat and humidity, not of drought or unreasonable AC utility bills but a breeze from a long-ago season, summer as well but of lower temperatures, of light evening rain bringing fine finish to a calm day. Why the memory trigger? Why the whiff when it is still spring and only a hint of summer?

You enter the garage in your later 20th-century home where wood is from quick-growth trees and not the old-growth fir in your grandfather’s early-century house planted 100 years before, but you smell the ancient wood. Why are you taken back to childhood in a modern garage that should not remind you of another time?

You get into your car on an early morning when no one else seems to be on the road, and while the engine is purring on familiar roads, making you happy, you realize that with you there is a scent of someone long ago when for the road ahead, with or without cars, seemed smooth passage. Why the scent, the memory?

You are at the table, an adult who helped prepare the food, who earned money to buy the ingredients, who feels responsibility for others and self has been met, but your mind brings you back to your parents’ table when they made the dishes, earned the money. Just the steam coming from mashed potatoes with pepper and butter – the total fragrance – brought you back. And you still use the old family potato masher. Why the recall?

These memory visits happen to us all, anchors to the past, which stabilize us in the present and carry us into the future.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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