Unlocking the door, I walked alone into grandma’s house. Probably the last time I’m going to be here. I breathed in gladly; it smells the same as it always did – the same as when I was a child sprinting around wildly and happily and always well fed.
I could smell the memories of a cake base rising in the oven, vanilla powder dusted into a bowl cream whirring and whipped up. Cooked apples. Fenugreek in butter fried onions. Hot coffee and steam squirting out of the filter coffee machine.
I cannot keep that smell. Nowhere else on the planet will have that same scent and soon it will go.
I looked a picture of their family house. I spent so many happy summers here. It was one of those photos that are taken from the air during a long hot summer when the grass was slighly parched in the field nearby. The photo was framed and hung in their apartment corridor. The house became too big so they moved into an apartment. The apartment became too big and now my grandmother is in a room in a care home. So I stood in the corridor and took the photo off the wall.
That evening I took the framed photo to the room. I lay in bed looking at the picture – everything was in its place, like, where it should be. I can remember running on the grass, sitting on a table under the walnut tree, taking a nap in the garden house, watching the water from the watered violet roses drip darkly onto the pebbledash pavement slabs only to evapoute quickly in the hot sun. I could remember peering into the letter box and cooling my foreames in the rainwater bucket which also hosted a few unlucky floating wasps. I remember gravel driveway and the marble steps to the front door.
All of that is in the picture which I can hold onto like a teddy bear, but how can I remember the scent?