Soft places and cicadas
"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory"
-Marcel Proust "The Remembrance of Things Past"
A couple of blocks from home there's a park, a handful of grassy knolls lined with beech trees surrounded on three sides by tall buildings. There are dozens of parks like this scattered around the city, but this one has something unusual about it. Maybe it's the way that the buildings block the wind, or the specific types of trees and vegetation, but about half of the times that I've passed by it, there's a smell that's straight out of my childhood. One day it might be falling leaves and the autumn hayrides, and another it might be the fresh smell of summer grass. Since smells are so closely tied to memory (scientifically speaking, the olfactory cortex is linked to the hippocampus and amygdala, which are responsible for emotional and place memories) I always get a momentary flashback to younger days.
Today, as I was riding my bike home, I passed by the park and came across a new addition: the trees were full of cicadas, buzzing just like they did the last time I saw the 17-year locusts arrive in Ohio (which, as scary as it sounds, was not the last time they showed up). I'm beginning to think that this park has some kind of mysterious connection to rural Ohio, as improbable as it sounds. Is there a field somewhere in Muskingum County with the smells of the Mediterranean and the sound of the metro?
Still, you should never look a gift horse in the mouth, so I came home, packed a lunch and a blanket, and waited for Amy to come home from work for a picnic under the buzzing trees. It's not quite the same as actually going back to visit, but until transporters and time machines are cheap and reliable, it's the next best thing.
-Marcel Proust "The Remembrance of Things Past"
A couple of blocks from home there's a park, a handful of grassy knolls lined with beech trees surrounded on three sides by tall buildings. There are dozens of parks like this scattered around the city, but this one has something unusual about it. Maybe it's the way that the buildings block the wind, or the specific types of trees and vegetation, but about half of the times that I've passed by it, there's a smell that's straight out of my childhood. One day it might be falling leaves and the autumn hayrides, and another it might be the fresh smell of summer grass. Since smells are so closely tied to memory (scientifically speaking, the olfactory cortex is linked to the hippocampus and amygdala, which are responsible for emotional and place memories) I always get a momentary flashback to younger days.
Today, as I was riding my bike home, I passed by the park and came across a new addition: the trees were full of cicadas, buzzing just like they did the last time I saw the 17-year locusts arrive in Ohio (which, as scary as it sounds, was not the last time they showed up). I'm beginning to think that this park has some kind of mysterious connection to rural Ohio, as improbable as it sounds. Is there a field somewhere in Muskingum County with the smells of the Mediterranean and the sound of the metro?
Still, you should never look a gift horse in the mouth, so I came home, packed a lunch and a blanket, and waited for Amy to come home from work for a picnic under the buzzing trees. It's not quite the same as actually going back to visit, but until transporters and time machines are cheap and reliable, it's the next best thing.
posted by greg at 9:19 PM
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