The right scent can teleport you.
The breakroom in one of the old courthouses I frequent smells just like the old farmhouse. When I’m in that county, I make it a point to go in there and let it take me back.
Baking bread. The laundry detergent and soap Grandma and Grandpa used. Coffee. The bed clothes in the two extra rooms rarely used. The oval rugs. OId couches. Knick-knacks. Modest living on the farm.
Perhaps I’m just weird.
I could write a thousand words, more, about Grandpa, too. I probably will. But not here. This one is for Grandma.
In 2014, I watched her last minutes. Her eyes were closed. Sunken. She made senseless noises. Years before, I had written the words she requested in her advanced directive forbidding anything that would keep her alive.
The reality was hard to watch.
I wanted to remember her stirring up my chocolate milk at the table in the farmhouse while the homemade bread she baked browned in the toaster oven. To watch her finish it with churned butter and grape jelly. To listen to her scold me for leaving the water running while I brushed my teeth during my summer stays at the farm. To remember her smile at me years later when I visited her in the retirement community and she taught me to bake her triple-rise bread recipe.
When I sat with Grandma Falkenberg to update her estate plan, I was no longer the boy mowing her lawn the summer Grandpa died. I was the 35-year-old lawyer giving her legal advice.
“I don’t want an IV,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am.” Wrote that down. I’d take it back to the office and draft it.
“What do I owe you?”
“Nothing, Grandma.”
“Nonsense. This is your business. I’m going to pay you.”
I could tell you who won, but you already know.
We watched her fight like hell against dehydration in a room with no nurses. No machines. No intent to save. She spoke incoherent to people who weren’t there. I imagined she was reliving memories decades gone in a flurry of fading synopses.
The waning hours of a full 94 years.
We lived that moment. It was far tougher for her than us.
Tougher.
She was the greatest generation. She always cooked. She always cleaned. Gave birth to five children, some (maybe all) at home. Gardened. Canned. Kept the Lutheran faith. Never gave up. Grandma Falkenberg held onto the farm after Grandpa died as long as she could.
A warrior.
I sat in my office the night before we probated her will and reviewed the docs. Made sure everything was right. My wife was home with small children while I worked late.
It had been a long day so I moved the file and myself to the office couch. My mind ran across a coop and farmyard full of chickens. A little rock house with decades of smoked meat seared into the wooden frame. A barn full of Grandpa’s re-built and re-purposed bikes that we grandchildren fought over to ride down the long driveway and down the quiet country road. Sleeping during the summer on the screened-in porch with a giant box fan on high.
Peeing on the electric fence.
We’d listen to Grandpa’s stories and smell his cigars over the chirping of nighttime crickets on the big covered porch under the bug zapper’s blue light. Snap. Fizzle. Another one gone.
Another Pearl cracked.
Another cigar lit.
Maybe that’s why I like sitting out at night so much. It’s in my DNA.
We cousins played hide-and-seek in the dark. Then we listened to the grown-ups talk about politics and the Cowboys and the Oilers and the price of gas and livestock. Grandma making sure we grandchildren, “the little ones,” she called us, were cared for. Food. Blankets. Warmth.
At lunch it would be the Swap Shop and then Paul Harvey on the noon-time kitchen radio.
I went to court the next day with my uncle and shed the only tears I’ve ever cried in a courtroom. I fought them. Didn’t want to let myself feel it. But it was hard and I can admit that now.
Nearly a decade after her death I asked Dad if I should go see the farm. It’s abandoned. The folks who bought it from Grandma back in the ‘90s left long ago. Nature and livestock assumed command.
“Don’t go, Bobby.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’ll just make you sad. I wish I hadn’t gone,” Dad said. “There were horses in the house when we went.”
It was the home where he spent most of his childhood. Where two grandparents and five uncles and five aunts and fifteen cousins celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter from the ’60s until the mid ‘90s. Where my parents took us most Sundays.
The farm. Grandma’s stern face and loving heart.
Her obituary was 152 words. That’s all she would have wanted. But not near enough.
That place is gone forever. I couldn’t even visit the farm house if I wanted to.
Why do I write about this sad, nostalgic stuff?
Because I have to.
If I understood why, then maybe I wouldn’t write it. But I don’t understand why, nor do I really care to. So I write it. It is what it is.
And next time I’m in that old courthouse, like always, I’ll walk into that breakroom. Even if someone’s in there having lunch or a snack, I’ll be the strange man in a shirt and tie standing near the window, closing my eyes, taking a deep breath through my nose.
Back through the decades.
It’s the late ‘80s. My childhood is undisturbed. Everyone is still home. Everyone is still alive. All my dreams and my confusion and the mystery . . . each yet breathe.
I have found the talisman. The only place left in the world that allows me to time travel, if only for a minute, to an ordinary house on an unassuming road in a sea of farmland.
If this is all that’s left, just this little bit, I’ll take it.
