Our sense of smell is a curious thing. Forming powerful connections to our memories, scent turns us into time travellers. One whiff of an old familiar odor and off we go to another time and place, sometimes wonderful and comforting, like the scent of pipe smoke taking me to see my long dead maternal grandfather, and other times unpleasant or even scary, like the scent of chilli beans burnt to the bottom of the pan taking me back to one of the first meals I was responsible for cooking after my mom’s accident, waiting for my father to discover I had ruined supper.
Little things, unexpected things, can trigger massive shifts through time and space. For example, I’ve been using the same brand of hair products for most of my adult life, but recently, they changed the formula and turned a welcoming scent into an overwhelming pungent stench that fills my entire head. One squirt into the palm of my hand, and I am instantly transported 28 years into the past into the back of my grandparents’ old full-sized van, perched on a lumpy bench seat next to a box of brightly wrapped rectangles of heavily scented shaving soap purchased in a Mexican border town, along with a year’s supply of my grandparents’ prescriptions.
The soap smells so strong that I feel queasy, but I can’t say anything, because there isn’t anywhere else to sit, and my grandpa doesn’t want to put the box on the floor because he doesn’t want it to get damaged. My father is back at the RV park on South Padre Island, Texas, getting his fishing tackle ready. My grandpa is driving, silently, with my grandmother in the passenger seat. My mom and brother are sitting on the center bench, him inspecting his new hand-carved chess set, her listening politely while my grandmother outlines all the reasons my uncle’s new Dutch wife is far superior to non-Dutch wives (my mom isn’t Dutch).
She does this a lot, my grandmother, digging at my mom. Though not just at my mom. “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much” is her most frequent saying. I think if she misses being surrounded by Dutch people so much, she should just go back. She hasn’t lived there since she was a child, but whatever. Just go.
It really must hurt her that my dad so thoroughly rejects his Dutch heritage. About five years ago, when I was eight, he left me with her for a few hours, and when he came back, she was showing me a collection of plastic placemats with Dutch words on them, trying to teach me a few. I felt so special, that maybe I was worthy of her Dutch blessing. He came in and overheard. He ordered me to go outside, but didn’t even wait until the door closed behind me before he started yelling.
I guess when he started kindergarten in Michigan, he didn’t speak a word of English. Unable to ask where the bathroom was, he peed his pants on the first day of school. He was so humiliated that he refused to speak Dutch again and refused every tradition that he could. Her perfect first born son, rejecting her proud Dutch heritage.
My father is still out fishing, my brother and grandpa with him. We sit in my grandparents’ trailer, watching Gone With the Wind and politely listening to my grandmother talk over it.
“I saw your lunch today.”
Long pause.
“Yes?” my mom says.
“Well, I didn’t see any speculaas. They are Ron’s favourite.”
Long pause.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what that is,” my mom says politely.
My grandmother makes a noise in her nose. “Traditional Dutch cookies. You don’t make them for him?”
“No, I don’t. He’s never mentioned them.” My mom looks very small in her chair, though she is eleven inches taller than my grandmother.
“He shouldn’t have to. Here.” She abruptly gets up from her chair and walks across the trailer. She lifts a strip of wood off a nail on the wall, comes back, and holds it out to my mom. My mom accepts it and cradles it gingerly in her lap. There are three windmills carved into the dark-finished wood, each about two inches tall and one inch wide. My grandmother walks to the tiny kitchen area, pulls out a small plastic file box, and, without looking, whips out a yellowed recipe card that she hands to my mother. “Take it. I don’t need it. I have made them so many times for the family that I have it in my heart.”
I look curiously at the wooden block.
She scowls at me and says, “It’s a mold, for shaping the speculaas.”
Later, my mom cries in the darkness, lying in their bed in our pop-up camper. Between my father’s snores, I can hear a catch in her breathing out, a ragged edge to her breathing in, the muted slither of her pulling a tissue out of the box.
I want to tell her I love her, that it will be ok. I want to tell her I love her all the more for not being a bitter arrogant Dutch woman. I want to tell her that I have secretly started my own saying, “Dutch ain’t much.”
But I say nothing out of fear of disturbing my father. And like me, my mom would be deeply humiliated to be caught crying.
So I say nothing.
I had to change hair products; I couldn’t have my head filled with all this every time I washed my hair. Like the scent, the memories are overpowering and unpleasant, mostly because of what I didn’t say. Or do. Adult me would give anything to go back and stand up to the terrifying little woman, to stand up for my mom. To tell her it was none of her business what cookies my mom did or did not make, that she was a wonderful wife and mother, and that I was glad she wasn’t Dutch, because to me, Dutch meant small and petty and mean.
Now my hair products smell like a New Age shop filled with crystals and incense and brightly patterned scarves and wall hangings, all pretty neutral memory trips, so I keep them, for now. At least until something else surfaces, and I have to change again.