Excerpt from β€œEaster and Politics,” chapter 24 in Mennonite Daughter: The Story of a Plain Girl

 

Two doors led into Grandma Longenecker’s kitchen. On this particular Sunday, we aimed for her back door. After Daddy parked our car alongside the back porch, we scrambled out, bounded up the steps, and burst through the back door to Grandma’s kitchen. My sisters and I wore our straw, beribboned Easter hats and pastel wool spring coats. I was not a church member yet; mine was tweedy pink with teal flecks.

The older folks from Grandma Longenecker’s side of the family would come in the side door under the verandah overhang, a parade of Martins, relatives from my dad’s side of the family, his mother’s kin, laughing and jabbering in anticipation of a ham dinner around Grandma’s stretched-out table that followed the curve of the bay window at one end of her kitchen facing the garden. Usually one of my great-aunts, Mattie or Bertha, walked in with a clay pot of hyacinths. I especially liked the hot pink and lavender clustered blooms, their spicy-sweet, oily-green fragrance combining with ham aroma scenting the air. Even now, when I walk by a hyacinth display in a shop, the intoxicating scent aroma takes me straight back to Easters of my youth in the 1950s.

 

Feeling Rich, in Touch with our Senses, another blog post on our marvelous sense of smell, written in my first year blogging. 2013.

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Treat yourself or a loved one to another gift for the senses this Mother’s Day: Β My Memoir: Mennonite DaughterΒ 

 

Find my Memoir Here

Thank you!


 

What scents take you back to a happy spot in your childhood? To another pleasant memory?

Your favorite spring bloom?