There are times when a smell hits your olfactory scenes opening a door to the past that has been shut a very long time. At that moment you are transported to a place in time, a place once known so well. Or maybe a sound or even an image takes you back and you become a child again, a child with weeks of summer to enjoy.
For me summer memories are infused with smells, voices thickly accented by tongues uneasy with English pronunciations and faces, forever etched in time, now gone to their reward.
Onset in the 1950s became a hive of activity from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The air was fragrant with the smell of seasonal concession stands, many owned by people who were first or second generation in the U.S.
The Greek family would open their bakery. The Italian family would throw open their pizza-by-the-slice window. The Irish family, father and son, took the wooden shutters off the front of their walk-up ice cream counter to begin dispensing creamy soft-serve, a true sign summer had arrived. The beach concession owned by a Polish family served hot dogs, hamburgers, and fries and their own locally produced soft drinks we called soda.
The aromas from one end of the main drag to the other permeate all my memories of summer. The season brought not only flavors and smells, it brought a melting pot of cultures. I see the vendors’ faces, hear their voices, and I smell the aromatics from the pots, pans and kettles floating like flotsam and jetsam on the warm summer breezes of remembered times.
Ma would buy fresh strawberries and cantaloupes from the Cape Verdean family who drove their flatbed truck up and down the streets singing out for all to come and buy “Straw-ber-ries!” I’d be sent out to flag down the truck. The driver, after slipping out from behind the steering wheel, would grab a few berries from the back, handing them to me with his sunburned hand. Oh the taste of those strawberries. They oozed goodness that one could smell before biting into the tender flesh, a very special gift from nature. “Thank you, Mr. Lopes,” I’d call as the truck rumbled on to the next street. For a long time after the truck left our street, I could still hear the voices singing that summer refrain, “Straw-ber-ries!” While the strawberries’ flavor remains like a souvenir I can hold, it is Mr. Lopes’ large warm hand I see in my mind’s eye.
Watermelon slices from that green grocer, another exclusively warm weather treat, were chilled on beds of weeping ice chips. The taciturn old man, whose furrowed brow didn’t scare me away, owned the open-air stall. He didn’t speak a word of English but understood what I wanted. One nickel would buy a thick hunk of melon almost too large for a small child to hold due to its water weight. He’d gesticulate that I was to skedaddle to the sidewalk curb with my juicy treasure. Rivers of watermelon juice would run down my arms dripping off my elbows as I gobbled up the pink goodness as fast as possible. Returning home, I’d have to be hosed down outside so as not to sully my mother’s clean kitchen floor.
There are other smells that come back to me as I wander the sun-dappled avenues of my childhood memories. Laundry hung on clothes lines. Wet bathing suits. Coppertone suntan lotion. Seaweed beds at low tide. The Cushman Baker’s truck. Mrs. Colligan’s roses. Corn on the cob, ice pops, Ma’s potato salad. The petrichor that hung in the air after a thunderstorm like exotic musky perfume. Everything seemed to have its own unique aroma.
There was that summer Dad would collect me and my brother for weekend visits. He often planned a special event, taking us places we had never been before. The sight of Lincoln Park was thrilling. We’d never been an amusement park. Our eyes were wide with awe as we heard the music from the Ferris wheel, or ate red cotton candy that smelled like crayons but tasted so amazing.
We ate delicious clam cakes for the first time at the drive-in theater while watching monsters crawl across the enormous screen. The bellowing scary creatures ready to step out of the screen and grab us was punctuated by mosquitoes that tormented us. Plymouth Rock was a bit of a disappointment. But the smell of small cedar boxes for sale in the gift shop was intoxicating.
I earned my Girl Scout cooking badge by preparing a menu and then making the meal unaided. I made a baked chicken dinner at Dad’s house on Spring Street in Marion. When he came into the kitchen from his shop his face smoothed as he said, “That smells real good.”
Years later, Dad bought his first travel trailer. He’d take my brother to Maine, or later still, my son. Those summer journeys were fondly remembered decades later when drifting thoughts were all that remained of his cognition. You could bring a smile to his face by simply saying, “Winnebago.”
Dad’s travel rigs always smelled of frozen TV dinners, a mainstay of every trip. You knew he was preparing to take off when he’d go to the grocery store and return home loaded down with sacks of TV dinners ready for the tiny freezer in the Winnebago. He’d mutter a little tuneless song under his breath as he unpacked the dinners and loaded them into that toy-sized freezer, “Do, do, do, dee, dee, dee…”
Onset, long a haven for warm weather fun, would fill to the brim with “summer people.” The influx was a welcomed seasonal distraction from the long hold of winter. Cottages opened and the lives lived therein added to the smells, sights and sounds. When Labor Day weekend came there was great migration as the summer people headed back to their homes in New York City, Providence, Boston, and Hartford, Connecticut. The quiet was deafening. For a kid whose weeks had been spent in constant motion and whose senses had been so fully engaged, the change in season was traumatic.
Today as I unpack the dusty trunks of my mind, I think of all those people, all those sounds and smells. And I realize for many it was a way of making a living, capitalizing on the post-WWII economy and society’s newly found “leisure time.” These were for the most part hard-working people supplying what the population demanded, food and fun. Those who owned cottages were enjoying the fruits of their labor most likely for the first time. Back then, however, they were all just “summer people” who came in on a high tide and, by September, were ready to ebb away.
This Mattapoisett Life
By Marilou Newell
