Music makes me sigh.
Releases some unknown tension and I can relax.
I put on Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Cello Preludes and it was like I was melting.
I heaved a big sigh and just sank into my chair.
My body hurts today.
My shoulder is a nuisance.
Apparently I pushed too hard in yoga on Monday or maybe it was carrying the baby as much as I did today, but ouch.
Ugh.
Getting old.
I’m sure I will look back at being 44 and laugh at myself thinking that I am old.
The fact is.
I don’t feel my age.
Oh.
I suppose my knees feel twice my age and my shoulder feels like a baseball pitcher being put out to pasture.
But.
Feeling my age?
No.
I don’t think I feel any certain age.
Although I do recall a time when I realized that all people below a certain age annoyed the shit out of me, I don’t subscribe to any particular feeling when I think, “I feel this old.”
The little girl I watch is four.
She likes to ask me about my age, “I’m 44 honey, eleven times older than you.”
And that is intense to contemplate.
I remember being four.
Pivotal things happened.
Then again.
I don’t remember a lot of being four either.
Um.
Pivotal things happened.
For the most part, however, I have an extraordinary memory and I’m good at replaying scenes as I have taken them in.
If I can hone in on a detail I am suddenly filling all the spaces with colors and sounds and emotional movement and music, with narrative, and it is as though I am watching a movie.
As I have gotten older some memories stick more than others.
Certain scenes, images, smells.
Oh.
A smell can carry so much weight in it.
Or a taste of something.
Tomatoes with salt from my grandfather’s garden.
Raspberries and milk with sugar in a green plastic bowl, raspberries I picked with my grandmother.
Apple cider.
The top sweetest part of the 2 gallon milk jug that we would pour the homemade apple cider into after running it through the press.
My grandfather unearthed an old apple press and rigged it to a lawn mower motor and we made cider using that press for years.
The house in Windsor that I moved to in 7th grade had an apple orchard, 4 Red Delicious trees (to this day I always wonder why the fuck they planted such boring ass apples, fodder for the press, all of them, we never ate them they were just such plain Jane apples) and 8 Courtland trees, plus four pear trees and one Golden Delicious–the animals and birds ate most of the Golden Delicious before they could even ripen, they were such amazingly sweet apples, almost translucent with sugar, you could see through the skin in the sunlight.
My mom would pour the cider into milk jugs and then freeze them in a giant freezer we had in the basement of the house.
The sweetest part of the cider would float to the top when it thawed and my mom tried valiantly to not let us drink any of the cider until it defrosted completely, but my sister and I often foiled her.
The cold, achingly sweet, syrupy juice taste will always stick in my memory.
Sometimes it is the smell of strawberries in the morning, reminding me of a very late night that became an early morning and it was warm and summer time in Madison and I was walking home from closing the bar and the after bar and I stopped by a vendor at the farmers market and bought a basket of strawberries and sat in the grass, kicking off my shoes and luxuriating in the feel of the soft, warm, dewy grass.
Sometimes it is a way a certain person smells.
Euphoria.
And I am smote with longing and love and desire.
Or the way someone’s skin feels against mine.
I think too, sensory, I’m going for the senses here, of a warm night, not many of them in San Francisco, a few years ago, when I walked down to the beach and the sand was still warm and the beach was deserted and the smell of bonfires wracked my memories.
And I was suddenly four-years old again, at a beach bonfire, with my mom and sister, who was already asleep, and my mom’s boyfriend, and there was the smell of driftwood fire and sea and that smell is some embossed on me, that to this day it really is one of my fondest smells.
Smell and memory are very tied to each other.
Riding my scooter to work this morning I passed a tavern on Lincoln that must have a popcorn machine, the smell was enticing and it was real popcorn, cooked in that oil that old-fashioned machines use and real butter smell.
I was suddenly in a movie theater, the old 99 cent movie theater on the far East side of Madison, that was probably actually the suburb of Middleton, that only had one screen and I was watching Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Which I didn’t get at all, but the movie was 99 cents and that’s why we were there and the popcorn was cheap and plentiful and I sat in that air-conditioned movie house and happily ate popcorn and watched a movie that I was too young to understand, but I remember the feel of the back of the movie seat in front of me on the bottoms of my feet and how I would press my feet hard into the seat to stretch and then curl back up into a ball and eat more popcorn.
Sometimes smells startle me too.
One day not too long ago I was riding up 7th and I smelled the smell of a tree, a tangerine tree in my mind, although I have no idea if it was tangerine or not, but my mom’s boyfriend had an apartment that had a tangerine tree outside of it and I would pick them and peel them sitting on the back cement steps while they got high smoking pot.
I was suddenly a little girl in a sundress with sticky fingers and bare feet and I could see all the tangerines in the tree and felt satiated with the ones I had eaten and sleepy from the sunshine.
Oh.
All the memories.
The best part of getting old, accruing all these luscious things that I get to stock pile in my brain.
In my heart.
In my soul.
All the amazing things.
There are so very many.
And I am grateful for them all.
Yes.
Yes.
I am.
Grateful beyond words.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Auntiebubba 