Uncategorized

Thanks to everyone visiting my blog! Coming from New England, I have to have maple syrup around: it is one of life’s wondrous staples and I love its smell.  There are lots of imitations out there, Mrs. Butterworth’s for example, but nothing beats the real stuff. Maple syrup is made from the sap of the sugar maple, red maple or black maple trees, according to Wikipedia. I never knew there were so many species of maple. These trees store starch in their trunks and roots before winter and convert it to sugar (sap) in the spring.  The syrup is obtained by tapping the tree (boring a hole into the trunk) and hanging a bucket below the hole.  Heating the raw syrup evaporates much of its water content, leaving concentrated sweetness. Native Americans were the first to collect maple syrup and the practice was adopted by European settlers. Vermont is still the largest producer in the US, generating about 5.5% of the world’s supply. When I was little and we had a fresh snowfall, Mom gave us a bottle of maple syrup, which we poured on the snow, a quick dessert.  Today I’ll share a recipe for maple pumpkin pie that I found in a magazine a while back (apologies for not being able to cite it) and that makes my taste buds sing. MAPLE PUMPKIN PIE Serves 8 9 inch prepared deep dish pie crust in a pan 15 oz can pumpkin puree 1 cup grade B maple syrup 1 cup heavy cream 4 eggs 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp ground ginger ½ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp allspice Pinch salt   Heat oven to 350o. Place pie crust on cookie sheet.  Whisk together pumpkin puree, maple syrup, heavy cream, eggs, spices, and salt. Pour into prepared crust. Bake 50-60 min, until center is just set. Set on rack to cool completely. 0 0

The lovely smell of linden tree blossoms in the spring takes me back to Plymouth, where I grew up, and the old library where I spent so many happy hours reading.  The library, which has since been replaced with a big modern one, was an imposing two story block building with columns on a narrow street lined with old, old houses.  It was set back from the street and had four linden trees in front, two on either side of the walk leading to the heavy double doors. The library was a regular stop every Saturday morning for the whole family, and the children’s books were in the basement.  The basement room was cozy and had old diamond-paned windows through which came wobbling light, and it was a splendid place to spend a rainy morning reading books in one of the outsized (to me) comfortable chairs.  This is where I found the Narnia series which so enchanted me that I bought the whole series in hardback when I was a graduate student, for the children that would be 12 more years in the coming! Linden trees have such a strong tug on my memory and my heart that we recently planted one at our lake house. 0 0

Not many people would immediately associate kerosene with the letter K. But the 100+ year old house I lived in while growing up in Plymouth had a kerosene stove in the kitchen. My mother kept it fired up for slow cooking. The supply of kerosene for the stove was found in a large cylindrical container with a cap and spout that fit on the back of the stove, and it was my job to take the container down to the basement and fill it from a large drum we kept near the outside entrance. There were two rather nasty problems with this job, about which I complained heartily to no avail. The first is that I always got kerosene on my hands, and the smell of kerosene is not particularly pleasant. The second is that I had to go down into the basement. The basement of the house was deep, large and early on contained one of those huge octopus furnaces and delivered warm air through grates on all three floors.  Spooky. The good thing about the kerosene is the wonderful dishes my Mom would cook on the stove all day – beef stew, spaghetti sauce, chop suey, pea soup, boiled beef – the odors of those meals permeated the house and more than made up for the smell of kerosene I couldn’t quite wash off my hands for a day or two. 0 0

This is a short, very sweet memory for me. When my husband and I moved to California in 70’s, the apartment we had rented in Newport Beach wasn’t going to be available until the end of August. So we moved into the spare bedroom of some friends from the lab where we would be working.  We had come from Cleveland, so every day in southern California was like a vacation: sunshine, warmth, the lure of the beach.  It took us several months to get settled in mentally! Outside our bedroom window was a night blooming jasmine, and every night when we went to bed, we inhaled the wonderful, almost overpowering scent of that flower.  Did you know that this jasmine is a member of the potato family? Whenever I smell jasmine, it takes me back all those years to the wonder of being in California for the first time. 0 0

With all the antibiotics, soothing balms and even treated Band Aids available to treat and disinfect kids’ cuts, there’s clearly a generational gap in the use (and smell) of iodine.  When I was in my tomboy stage, which only lasted 10 years, there wasn’t much I didn’t do that was bound to give me cuts and bruises: climbing tall trees, running through the woods behind our house, exploring a collapsing 150 year old hotel, riding my bike at breakneck speed, and playing all sorts of sports: field hockey, basketball, softball, ice hockey, swimming and tennis, plus reckless games of corner tag and some version of hill dill in the local pool.  Good god, where did I get that energy? I could use it now… Most of the time I ignored the cuts, but occasionally my mother would catch me in passing, grab the iodine, swab the cut with soapy water and apply that element liberally to the affected area.  Memories linger. Whenever I smell iodine, I cringe, because it was always accompanied by a brilliant burning sensation that was worse than the cut. 0 0

You can’t be a good Southerner without associating H with honeysuckle.  Honeysuckle is a hardy climbing vine, common in North America, and there are 180 species worldwide. I discovered there is even a species in the foothills to the Himalayas.  Did you know you can eat honeysuckle? Honeysuckle attracts butterflies and hummingbirds, of which we have many in the summer.  But best of all is sitting out on a warm night, watching the stars, listening to the tree frogs, and enjoying the sweet odor of honeysuckle on the evening breeze. 0 0

One of the smells that I will roll down my car window to inhale, and then drive by its source again, is newly mown grass.  I like to sit outside on a lawn chair while my husband Gene is mowing, just so I can drink it in. There’s really nothing quite like this odor, and it recalls long, lazy summer days swinging in the hammock on our porch, enjoying the smell of grass, listening to the mower and my father swearing at it.  In those days, lawnmowers could only be pushed and given the size of our lawn, he had a right to swear. For some reason, Dad never asked me to mow, but after Gene and I were married and bought our first house, I became a consummate mower of the lawn.  My husband, the new MD, was on call every other night, thus making him unfit for physical activity on the day in between, except once in a blue moon.  So I mowed and enjoyed it.  Now Gene runs around our large lawn on a mower with a seat.  Same smell but not so much exercise. Summer’s coming.  Bring on the grass. 0 0

I love forsythia, their delicate yellow flowers with the barely detected scent.   What I didn’t like, when I was a kid, was the fact that a forsythia branch was the means by which punishment was enforced in our home.  While my mother had a Master’s degree in verbal tongue-lashing, my father was in charge of physical discipline.  Thus the switch, a solid forsythia branch, was frequently applied to my or my brother’s posterior by my Dad, with varying degrees of force and frequency depending on the infraction.  “Wait ‘til your father gets home,” was an ominous sign of things to come. My uncle was of like mind with Dad, but he applied a belt to my cousins. The belt was an old black leather strap that hung in the kitchen closet in their home, but which traveled with them to Plymouth each summer, when they came to visit us.  My brother and I swore that what we experienced was the worse than what our cousins endured, and part of each visit involved a lengthy recounting of recent times the belt and switch had been used, the infractions that had called for their use, and the virtues of each form of punishment.  All this ended during one of the cousin invasions when, exasperated to the limit by our behavior, our respective fathers gave us the choice: switch or belt. The cousins all sat down on the kitchen floor and recommenced our discussion of the merits of each of these instruments of torture.  The dads watched on in amusement for a while, then demanded an answer. I remember saying, “I think I’ll take the switch,” to which my cousins replied, “We’re okay with the belt.” Later that evening, our backsides smarting from the latest insult, we collectively decided not to discuss our different forms of punishment again, just in case discussing them might somehow elicit their use. My husband and I planted forsythia along our driveway, but I never once cut a switch when my kids were growing up. Not that I didn’t think about it. 0 0

Although eucalyptus is used in the saunas of many spas, I was first encountered its unique odor when we moved to California in the 1970s.  Eucalyptus trees were first planted in California in the mid-1850s for use in shipbuilding, similar to its use in Australia. However, the California blue gum eucalyptus split and curled when dried, unlike the old growth trees from Down Under.  The eucalyptus was then planted to be used as fuel and windbreaks.  But if you want to see rows and rows of them, find some railroad tracks in that state. They were planted alongside the tracks so that eucalyptus wood could be cut on site for replacement railroad ties.  Alas, the wood proved too soft for ties, which split when spikes were hammered into them. California’s love affair with the eucalyptus continued through the 20th century, with dozens of medicinal uses proposed, most of which were bogus. But eucalyptus oil is still used in conjunction with steam to open up the sinuses. Today the tree is considered an invasive species that kills native vegetation. My introduction to the unique eucalyptus smell came on a hot day in southern California, tracking through the piles of leaves and bark sheddings from the trees, alongside some railroad tracks. The smell of the oil permeated my sinuses and left me with an indelible memory of my time in that the Golden State. 0 0

Okay, this is not pleasant for almost everyone else, but this smell was certainly integral to my life as a teacher of human anatomy.  I taught in a dissection lab for over 40 years and the smell of the embalmed bodies is one that lingers – not in just memory but also on your clothes.  If I were in an elevator after class, there would always be someone who would wrinkle up their nose and say, “What IS that smell?” When the medical students joked about it, I’d remind them that I’d smelled like that for decades, whereas they only had a semester at best to deal with it!  My lab coats are wrapped in plastic in the closet because, even after years of washing, they still have the faint odor of my profession. 0 0