One memory

          Natalie Goldberg in "Old Friend from Far Away", a book about writing memoir, asked an interesting question.  If you were losing your memories and could only keep one, what memory would you keep?   Been pondering this one for the last two days, which is why I didn't write.

          There are the important memories, the memories of life changing events:

• that magical point in my internship when I suddenly knew I could do this: I could diagnose illness and take care of patients and do it well
• the afternoon on the banks of the Potomac River when the man I loved said he loved me
• picking up Diane at the airport or, even better, the day she called me Mommie
• the parade out to the car the day we brought Nerissa home
• the experience at Trap Pond and the weekend that followed when I knew without a doubt that there was a God and I needed to trust Him (or Her)
• the day they put Sammy in my arms in the delivery room and I became a grandmom (that might be the best of all, but still, if I lost the other memories, would I keep that one?)

          There are other kinds of memories though.  There is the memory of being a body in motion, of what it feels like to swim, to dive, to skate, to ski, to dance a contra dance, or do a foxtrot with someone who can grapevine across the floor, to sing a part and listen to the group and hear the harmony blend right.  The memory of an evening with family at Maggie Moo's, eating ice cream and laughing, not an important memory, but a wonderful one.  There are sense memories, of the way things taste: peach ice cream, my grandmother's turkey croquettes, chocolate mousse at a café in Paris.  There are sights: ocean waves, sailboats in the Chesapeake, hot air balloons over Brentwood,  the color turquoise, fields of lavender flowers: henbit and purple dead nettles and blue bottle, or of yellow buttercups and butterweed and dandelion, sunsets and sunrises, and the large full hunter's moon on a cold, clear November night.  Touch memory includes swimming in a hot springs fed pool in Colorado with the snow coming down on my face, the softness of Cedar, my Labrador puppy, the way it feels to stroke the face of the man or child you love.  The sound of the music that unties the knots in my muscles and chest and soul: folk music, bluegrass, stuff from the 60's: Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, of the feel of a guitar in my hands and the sound it makes. 

          They say (whoever they may be) that scent is the strongest trigger of memory: that first scent of the sea as you drive over the causeway into Long Beach Island, the scent of the original Coppertone that brings back hot days at the beach, the smell of hyacinth and honeysuckle, the smell of food cooked by someone else when you are lying in bed, the smell of my mother's Emeraude, of her cigarettes and coffee.

          I think the one memory that I would keep is the smell of a wood fire.  It triggers so many other memories and I can't imagine that it ever wouldn't.  It is what I smelled when I was 5, walking into the lobby at Bear Mountain Inn, where we vacationed, a good childhood memory.  It was the smell of camping with scouts at Camp Laughing Waters, singing "Each Campfire Lights Anew" and "All night, All day", and trying to avoid getting smoke in our eyes, with my mother saying "Smoke follows the fool" as we scrambled around the fire to get away from it.  It was the same aroma as burning leaves in the fall, raked and piled up and jumped in several times before the burning, and also that of burgers on the grill at my mother's picnics.  It was the smell of a wonderful house where I spent weekends, with 11 fireplaces, and a mattress thrown in front of one in the old kitchen, to play guitar and sing and make love and sleep.  It was the odor of Diane's hair when she came back to me from Camp Arrowhead after her first week away.  It was the scent in the Seaford house the night we had the ice storm and the electricity went out.  I cooked dinner over a camp stove in the fireplace, then lit the wood fire while we ate chicken curry, and laughed and I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my 95 year old grandmother if the electricity didn't come back.  Fortunately it did.  Most recently, there was the solitary camping trip to Fall Creek Falls, with a deserted campground in late September.  I built a fire each evening and could play guitar and sing as loud and as long as I wanted, with no one to care or complain.  

           One memory, if that is all I get to have: the smell of a wood fire.