Written by my wife, Jean, with some concluding thoughts by The Wordwright.

As I was cooking broccoli recently, its wafted fragrance passed my nose. I was immediately taken back to Home Economics Class where I learned to prepare a couple of dishes we never had at home. Broccoli was one of them. Mother never grew this vegetable, so she bought some for me to prepare.

Another dish we learned to cook in that class was Spanish Hamburgers. My mother had never fixed that for our family either, so I prepared Spanish Hamburgers, adding one more recipe to our country home cuisine. Evidently it was a good choice because we had Spanish Hamburgers after that and we still do today. They are known as Sloppy Joes in this day and age, somehow I like the sound of Spanish Hamburgers better.

I still have the baking book we were given in Home Economics Class. It contains a lot of basic recipes for cake, muffins and such.

Open windows and doors on a sunny, warm day after being closed all winter, allow a refreshing fragrance to come inside. The birds chirping add to the enjoyment of the coming spring.

I well remember the smell of our everyday closet; as a child, where my mother and dad kept their work clothes worn while tending chores at the barn. We had a couple cows, sheep, hogs and chickens. The dirty boots worn on rainy days added to a smell I can still remember.

Gardenias will quickly bring to mind the corsages my husband, Bill, would buy me in our younger days. He said he didn’t know of any other kind of flowers to buy. They turned brown quickly on the edges so you could hardly wear them more than once.

Another important fragrance, smell or whatever you want to call it, was how my mother smelled to me as a young child. She was a stay-at-home farmwoman whose duties were ones that took her outdoors a lot. She would naturally perspire; she was not a dirty person, just that her clothes would absorb a work odor. Even if I had been blind, when she held and cuddled me, I would know it was Mother. It was not objectionable to me – is it possible there is such a thing as a “mother smell”?

Since we lived in the country and a road ran by a field in front of our house, I learned the sounds of all the neighbors’ cars. I didn’t even have to see the car to identify the neighbor who was going to town. Cars were not as plentiful in the 1930’s and 1940’s so it was not hard to recognize one from the other. I would hear one going by and say, “There go Siscos to town.”

Another sound, which would find us running outside, would be an airplane. We would look skyward until the plane was out of sight. Even today I find myself looking up if I hear one going over our house but I don’t run outside to view one. It’s amazing how our memory records such things and for so long a time too, I’m 75 now and those sights, sounds and smells are still fresh in my mind. ###

I am grateful my wife adds her occasional words for use in The Wordwright. Today, the sound might be a life-flight helicopter, and thoughts of accidents on the highway immediately come to mind. Commercial jets fly at such altitudes their sounds are no longer heard. The ear-piercing sounds of emergency vehicles often interrupt our peace and quiet. And, strange as it may seem that “sound” of everything electrical stopping when the electric goes off!

My own life contains a memory bank of sights sounds and smells—I can still smell the fragrance of oats cooked by my Great Aunt Vashti Wilson; the very texture and taste is clear in my mind to this day. Aunt Vashti also baked short bread, and this mere mention starts specific glands working. Toast being made at the table or in the broiler section of the gas oven in our kitchen brings back aromas; bacon frying in the skillet, with eggs cooking, all add to those memories that take us back when we were home as children. We had a toaster that had a unique feature allowing the toast to be swung out and away from the heating elements and turned on a pivot to swing back and toast the second side. The fancy modern toasters, where you dropped the bread into the top and bread could be toasted on both sides at once, were not on our kitchen table. Even then I marveled at the design of that special toaster.

The fragrance of popcorn cooking at a theater’s concession stand, and the other smells that flow through the corridors of our brain’s memory storehouse that recall the visits to the candy counter at Kresges (or another Dime Store) or the smell of tobacco at the drug store. The smell of a match that had just been struck by Dad as he lighted his pipe; this was before the days when fears of cancer outweigh the joy of an occasional smoke. The smell of Dad’s hunting jacket or the mixed odors of gasoline and oil as I stomped on the kick starter of my 1942 Cushman 3-wheeled motor scooter; and the rush of excitement as the sound of that single-cylinder motor promising an afternoon of traveling the streets of Lancaster or wandering the roads of Fairfield County.

All of us have such memories enjoying that “random access memory” for decades to come--long before we were to learn the word RAM. Computers have nothing on the brain God gave us.

THE WORDWRIGHT’S WIFE & BILL HIMSELF