Last night, I found myself on my first after-dinner walk in a decade, likely more.
I’d skipped lunch entirely — a slice of Gouda and two water crackers don’t count — and wanted to eat a meal that often-times gives me indigestion no matter how much I enjoy it. What with the book launched and well away, I decided I’d earned such a treat. I’d dine early and walk off the potential for ill-effects before they could keep me up all night.
[By the way, I think that’s very unfair. If it tastes delicious, and isn’t intrinsically evil like a triple-scoop banana split, a meal shouldn’t be allowed to give one stomach-ache. But I digress, and it’s a lost battle anyway: dieticians can cite chapter and verse about what makes X, Y and Z chemical compound indigestible.]
At any rate, I dined upon a medium-rare bison burger on a ciabatta roll, an ear of cream-and-sugar corn, a generous salad with a farm-fresh tomato. And a Northwest regional Otter Ale, which has taste-notes that remind me of Black Sheep Ale from North Yorkshire.
Discovering a neighborhood by nose
A walk at dusk lets you discover your neighborhood differently. In England, for example, where Timothy and I often strolled after dark, I would expect roses-and-lavender in a summertime London park. After we moved north, perhaps the fruity autumn of Hertfordshire orchard-and-vineyard country lanes. But what I smelled last night on my evening ramble took me down rather different memory lanes than I expected.
At the top of my neighborhood hill are two schools, quiet now in the summer dusk. The dry-grass smell of the middle-school playing fields wanted only the sound of an earnest elementary school band and the taste of strawberry shortcake to conjure the East Norwich Strawberry Festival my family attended every summer.
Turning the corner, I heard the tick-tick-tick-swish of a lawn sprinker — but before I heard it, I smelled luscious wet grass. All that was missing now was the musky note of wet bathing suit and grape jelly on a PB&J for my nose to feel six years old again.
Next, a smell I don’t think I encountered once in a decade of walks around Ealing: the acrid blast of lighter fluid followed by charcoal and hickory chips wafting smoke, a barbecue coming to life. (A little late for tonight’s dinner to be ready before 8 o’clock, as I’m sure a hungry person reminded the chef.)
Californian interlude
Walking back down the hill toward home, the breeze shifted and a burst of hot pinewood blew my way from the Priory’s wooded grounds. I like pine well enough, but my scent filing-cabinet associates it with wintry forests and a cold Solstice night. What I missed, quite suddenly, was a sound and smell purely Californian. A sultry breeze should carry the clacking leaves and intense aroma of eucalyptus, the quintessential tree of Monterey and Santa Clara counties in coastal California.
There was a great grove of them at a certain rocky cleft on Highway 101, between Mission San Juan Bautista and Prunedale, almost on the county line. We passed through the grove, the spicy eucalyptus rushing in the open car windows, whenever we drove home from San Jose or Oakland airports. Suddenly, your senses knew that home was less than an hour away.
We always took the cut-off from 101 above Salinas, following Highway 156 for Castroville and the coast. The sun-baked smell of eucalyptus would give way to fertilizer on the strawberry fields, the melancholy odor of fog, and underneath them both, the salt tang of Monterey Bay. Then we’d come out on Highway 101, and the dunes of Marina would flatten. Before us, the long, sparkling curve of Monterey and Pacific Grove, their lights flitting across the waves like fireflies. Finally, the sound of waves would complete the ensemble: scent and sound making the coast alive.
Proust may have chosen his tasty madeleine. Tonight, my memory chose to travel on the winds of scent.