Last night I tortured forced Rader to go to the Big Dam(n) Bridge and walk with me. You’d a thought I was plucking his toenails off with tweezers. It was “THE WORST THING EVER.” As a matter of fact, after the 45 minutes (remember I usually walk an hour plus–I cut it short just for his whiny butt) we got into the car and he immediately sent me a text message.

That sucked.

Good to know, but too bad.

Anyway, while I was walking and he was whining, we passed a section of woods that nearly knocked me over with memories. I smelled wild grapes and muscadines. (BTW, my spell check doesn’t recognize the word muscadine. WTF?)

Growing up, we had a small orchard with green apple, plum, peach, pear and loads of pecan trees. And we also had wild grapes growing on the fence of our property. My neighbors grew muscadines.

The smell of that wild fruit yesterday took me back to my childhood immediately. I know memories and smell are strongly connected, but it still shocks me when I’m damn near catapulted back into the 80s.

I used to walk along the fence and pluck the honeysuckle that grew among the grapes. (fresh honeysuckle is still one of my all time favorite smells) The grapes were NEVER any good, but every year I would hope they would be. I don’t know how many sour grapes I ate trying to find the one sweet wonder. It never happened, but I never stopped trying.

(Okay, I take that back, I did finally stop trying when I was attacked by a Blue Jay. That stupid bugger wanted me dead. I had to run across 5 acres of land to escape the blue devil. Totally uncool.)

Had my first sip of homemade muscadine wine when I was a teenager. It was so sweet. And my neighbors made muscadine jelly which was fantastic. After the Blue Jay incident, I would sneak over and sit beneath the neighbors’ muscadine vines and enjoy the smell because I missed my grapes.

Do you have any old memories attached to smell? Any recent ones?