return to Rye

They say that the sense of smell is the strongest evoker of memory. It certainly is so in my experience. The brine of the Atlantic mixed with damp wood brings back the NJ boardwalk—perhaps an endangered sense memory, though, as wood slats are replaced with recycled material.

But there is no replacing the smell of upstate New York. It smells like the 1950s summers of my childhood. I know, I’ve written about this before, but every time I return to the countryside north of New York City, it washes over and transports me.

It’s rich, green, damp and laden with as much memory as foliage. Salad days made concrete. Bungalow colonies with names like Blueberry and Kraus’s, and day camp color wars. (No, it wasn’t much like Dirty Dancing. That was much too upscale. Yet the film is oddly evocative. The 1998 flick, A Walk on the Moon, with Diane Lane was closer to our reality.)

So I returned yesterday and had my first morning walk with Angel, my friend Martin’s dog. The morning was dark, raw and wet. Lovely for me, not so much for Angel, who struggled a bit with her arthritis. Instead of lunging ahead, she was content to trot alongside and poke around. That was OK with me and my arthritis. We are both seniors.

I drank it in, so refreshing, mountain cool, like the fall days I so miss since my transplantation to Sarasota. Even the grayness was a pleasant change from the drumbeat of Florida sunshine.

So I settled inside today, to cozy up and read. I promised my friend Paula I would give Twilight a try. Sorry to say, that so far the immensely popular franchise leaves me bored. And considering how many hundreds of those books I’ve stacked, I am surprised and disappointed.

Later...