Smells, Cheese and Slaughter

It’s been a week of enhanced sense memory at my house. A few nights ago we made tacos. That was a frequent staple of my childhood home, and whenever I smell that fried-corn aroma I time travel to happy family dinners where we always worried there wouldn’t be enough cheese. There often wasn’t, because my mother tends to be stingy about cheese. In our adult years both my sister and I have gone overboard with cheese compensation. I cannot rest unless there are at least three pounds of cheddar in the house. I don’t know my sister’s strategy entirely, but I know she keeps the cheese well-stocked.

Last night I made a favourite casserole of mine. It’s second main ingredient is cooked chicken, and every other time I’ve made it I’ve stewed down some breasts. Yesterday, however, I got the brainstorm to use a whole cooked chicken, which I boiled. (Am I the only person who thinks of Herbert Hoover when I put chicken in a stewpot? Probably not.) For quite some time yesterday the house was filled to the rafters with the smell of stewing chicken.

Big mistake.

One of my least favourite childhood meals–the polar opposite to tacos, in fact–was Chicken & Noodles. Not because of the taste, I realise years later, but because of that stewed chicken smell. As the fat renders down and the blood boils out of the marrow it smells like slaughter. There are few smells worse than that of boiled whole chicken. I smelled that and it reminded me of how that schmaltzy odor hangs around the house for days like the presence of illness.

So I lit a candle I’ve saved for–literally–fourteen years. When I first bought it at Bath & Body Works it was a pretty light blue. Now after all that time it’s faded to mostly white, with just a memory of light blue. But it still smelled good. And it smelled like the apartment off Briley Parkway where I lived for the first 8 years of my life in Nashville. I think I’m getting to the stage in life where everything smells like some other place in time.