Madeleines

Chris at the Thinking Parents Wiki asks what sights, smells, sounds remind me of home?

Aside from the things that are exactly alike, sugarcane fields, cattle ranches, especially the flowers and palms, and license plates honoring "The Sunshine State", there are loads of things here in Far North Queensland that remind me of South Florida. Receiving our “Cyclone Awareness” guide and tracking map in the newspaper; being suspicious of any body of fresh water other than a swimming pool, and even then that cautious double check you do just in case...; and the summer downpours -- more so if they are accompanied by strangely comforting blasts of lightning and house-shaking thunder as both are fairly rare here -- all prompt memories of their northern hemisphere counterparts.

I thought I smelled my grandfather two years ago when we moved into our first rental house here. As the smell grew stronger, and more disconcerting considering it took place while I showered, a little detective work finally revealed it to be a giant mold colony growing in a fold of the shower curtain left behind by the owners.

Sitting on the couch surrounded by the kids introducing them to classic SNL bits via YouTube, most recently Will Farrell’s “More Cowbell” and his follow-up cameo with Queens of the Stone Age, flings me back in time to the sense of where I was when I first viewed them, on any of several comfortable beds or couches in any of several comfortable houses.

One significant reminder occurs whenever I’m up late at night on the computer. Just like my husband, Lulu, the four-legged member of our family, wakes up, stretches, glares at me still on my laptop way past the time decent folks should be in bed (I swear she even looks at the clock), utters a pained melodramatic groan, and then huffs a great sigh of exasperation before flopping back on her doggie bed.


We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

-- Marcel Proust