iLiza's eyes

They say that smell is the strongest trigger of memory. I remember this on days when my memory is triggered, or in random moments when I'm thrown back to the past and I'm shocked that such a memory still exists.

I remember it when I eat a certain kind of coffee cake that my mom used to make in the mountains on family vacations in Eagles Mere. Before our family went up, all four of us would go to BJ's and buy bulk quanities of food to last us the whole month in the mountains because once there, the ride to the grocery store took an hour each way and could destroy a morning on the beach. One year, my mom bought a lot of Bisquick and started making trays of this coffee cake as a munchy in the morning before heading off to our activities or as a mid-day snack. It was a really good coffee cake: a layer of crumbly cinnamon sugary goodness baked to a crisp formed a thick layer over the top, and the edges and corners used to get burned into thick cakes of solid brown sugar. I used to pick at the top.

But the cake was still made of Bisquick, so it had a distinct, grainy texture, a warm, processed kind of scent. And I remember that smell, sometimes, and I"m specifically thrown back to a cool, dreary afternoon on the screened-in porch of our annual rental house, "Fernbrook," picking at plate after plate of coffee cake and listening to Jewel's song "Painters" on my walkman as I slowly negotiated the giant family puzzle that was constantly being slaved over. With that coffee-cake smell comes the memory of high-altitude humidity, a damp forest with the distant sound of drip, the sound of a raging brook, the understanding of a enormous, silver lake nearby and a rich green color.

I remember Fernbrook as a musty, log cabin scent, a constant wetness of fresh wood. For some reason, I remember the room that my brother and I shared being really cold and bare, even though I know the heat was unbearable. I always remember it being wet there, and especially cold on the night when my father arrived from Philadelphia looking ghostly white having just hit and killed a baby deer. He had stopped the car to gain his composure after it happened, and the car driving behind him had stopped as well to make sure he was okay. They were shocked that he hadn't been killed: the baby deer had been with its mother, and from behind it looked as though he'd hit the enormous female head-on. Two days later, when driving back to Philadelphia, my father saw the baby deer dead on the side of the highway.

His car at the time was a red honda and I have two memories of that car: one is an awkward picture that my mom took of my dad standing by it in our driveway before he turned it in, and the other is the crushed, burgandy metal with baby deer fluff jammed up in all the jagged corners. It smelled like animal and sadness.

posted by iliza @ 10:13 AM