Clinton, S.C., May 19, 2021, 11:41 a.m.

Maybe it was because Zoom calls (first time I’ve ever had two in one day), and business considerations, and other frustrations, too, devoured yesterday.

This morning I sat in a booth at breakfast and got nostalgic about aromas.

I remembered how one grandparents’ house, on the Lydia Mill village, had a distinct smell, and one room, a living room where no one lived, had another. The aroma was that of a room humans seldom visited. Then I thought of the musty smell in in the upstairs of the other grandparents’ house, which had become dusty and unused when my father moved out to be my father.

No one lived in that living room because Mama Davis had a wooden stand with thick-glass shelves full of her prized possessions, her simple porcelain trinkets, and she didn’t want them shattered by careless grandchildren. I snuck in sometimes, just to stare at them. I knew better than to touch or hold in my hands.

Aromas take me back, and even the foul ones conjure up images in my mind of long ago. The smell of a herd of cattle. The sour stench of a high school locker room. When I wrote about stock car races near Phoenix, I’d drive past feed lots en route to the track, and the smell of manure wouldn’t seem quite so unpleasant because it created images of long-ago chores on the farm. In August, a visit to a locker room immediately creates memories of all those August two-a-days in 1975.

I’m getting old, but I remember what it was like to be young. I can smell it in my mind.

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