love & memories

My childhood smells like spf 30 and tar melting on the breakwater in the sun. Like rotting seaweed and seagull feathers, like engine grease and tangy metallic tools and bugspray mixed with sun mixed with the old red tent’s faded walls. It smells like my Grammy, which was actually just cigarettes and coffee but I had no idea I just loved her. Like orange blossoms and hot pavement, like lemon trees in my Grandmother’s backyard in Florida, and the powder she’d dust me with after a bath.
My childhood sounds like barnacles on rocks clicking and sighing with the receding tide. Like Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl out the sunroof of our Audi and up into the blue sky, fingers in the cool air, feet on the hot puckered vinyl seat below. It sounds like four-stroke engines battling for victory in the distance, like the high pitched drill echoing from the corners of my father’s repair shop. Like “love is patient, love is kind”, and “thank you for this day and this meal, in your name”. And like “one for the money, two for the show, three to get going now go cat go!” as my Grampa Bill pushed me on my swing hanging from the big old tree, the one with “Anna” painted on it.
My childhood tastes like the spicy jeweled nasturtiums my mother handed me to eat, and sun-warmed Gatorade, like mojo pork chops and frijoles negros in the Cuban neighborhood in Miami. It tastes like salty sea water, and the “last sip” of Daddy ‘s beer, thinking it was something like an honor.
It feels like the cool, smooth-bumpy interior of a refrigerator box in the yard, from its pristine fortress-like beginning to its shapeless, rounded, bent conclusion; containing children rolling down a subjectively huge hill, grass scratching by underneath, and finally suffering the final rip that ends both the usefulness and magic. It feels like the gritty, oily, toe-crowded floor of the wheel washing bin dad would fill with water to rinse the beach of my and my brother’s feet. It feels like the sharp points of crushed clamshell driveways and the baking heat of pavement on bare feet, except in the middle, along the thin, painted white line, where—if we could balance—it was cooler and smoother.

~ by Anna on May 8, 2008.