Now that I am a middle-aged grandmother, I oftentimes review the hollowed caverns of my decrepit mind and re-examine the things that stand out to me. Thankfully, when I think of something from my past it is always tied completely to a smell, which rises to the surface for me to follow it like a track of footprints toward a warm cabin full of memories in a snowy wood.

My grandmother lived in Brooklyn on East 15th Street and Avenue M. Her house was the place I wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world, mainly because she lived there. Life at 1365 was warm, loving, safe, and secure. Reminiscing about the days when I hid my face in the folds of her house dress fills me with a bouquet of fragrances that are entrances into my past. Every corner of my grandmother’s house had a distinct aroma, inside and out. Avenue M is a station stop on the BMT Brighton Line of the New York City subway, and it was an elevated el train, level with the second floor and in the backyard of my grandparent’s home. Along with the screeching brakes that we could hear from the station, there was always a layer of putrid diesel fuel, which wafted through air like a backdrop to a play.

Inside the house was a cedar chest, whose smell is seared in my mind. Every time it was opened, which was often as a favorite hiding place for children, the smell filled the cedar paneled porch where we congregated daily to watch the parade of shoppers passing by toward Avenue M. Wood smells had a strong impact on my memory, like the inside of my grandfather’s server where obsessive compulsive disorder reigned supreme. Perfectly stacked piles of sorted coins stacked in rows against the side, money wrappers, rubber bands, paper clips, and piles of newspaper clipping stacked in metal, mesh baskets. Mike’s server was the secret place that I would go to get gold and red paper rings from the cigar cases that I could wear proudly on my all my fingers. All the contents of the chest melded together with the spicy, leathery smell of cigars and dried out cherry wood. My grandma’s end tables were slathered with layers of lemony Pledge, and each drawer held a world of adventure filled with a cacophony of smells. A prominent china closet that housed decks of playing cards when opened its trapped, stagnant air held the fragrant promise of afternoon games of Pinochle and Gold Fish. Not to forget an entire second floor, whose wooden floors filled the air with the antiquated wooden smell of a colonial house I had visited. These floors had never been sanded or shellacked and were responsible for many tears shed as a result of deep, painful splinters in the feet of children who refused, after being repeatedly warned, to “…put their slippers on.”
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With the sudden loss of my father two years ago, it is just now that memories are starting to surface, which brings clarity and understanding to my childhood. My father was a first generation Italian of Sicilian descent who was rooted in the old country even though he was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. My father Phil’s body might have been in Brooklyn, but he was firmly planted in nature in Lecara Friddi, Sicily. No one spoke English in his home, and in those days, when sent to public school, if you couldn’t speak English you were sent home until you learned. He was sent home and allowed back when he had a grasp on the language a year later.

As I age, I understand the conflicts that I had with my father were mainly based in basic geography.  Here was a man who was steeped in old world tradition and culture surrounded by a modern Italian American wife and five daughters and a son. He lived in perpetual culture shock. His background was such that the male was the head of the house, so he exercised his authority with an iron fist and strong determination to control what was oftentimes out of his control.

Nowadays I spend some of my leisure time thinking back on some of the memories that can help me better understand a man whose good intentions, pride, hard work and definition of honor and respect went oftentimes severely misunderstood.
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