The Nostalgia of Fragrance

Another subzero morning, but the sun was shining brightly through my kitchen windows.  I picked up a grapefruit from the fruit basket and cut it in half. Immediately the citrus-y fragrance billowed upward, and I was transported to another time decades ago.

Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, our diet was pretty locally based, not by choice so much as availability, or lack thereof, of anything else. That meant our fresh fruit choices were mostly apples in the unfinished, unheated basements, maybe even pears for a few months, but melons and fresh berries were clearly late spring and summer treats. What we did have from outside the area, year round, was bananas. The small town IGA sometimes put "slightly used" (ie, overripe) bananas on sale for perhaps a nickel a pound, and that would be when my mother would stock up. The full price fruit (as I recall, usually only a dime or so a pound) was something we did get too, but these might be cut in half, placed next to each cereal bowl as a reminder that we were to share wisely.

In the winter we also had citrus fruit as often as the budget allowed, and this also was somewhat seasonal. sometime around Christmas, tangerines would appear in the stores, and we eagerly awaited these zipper-skinned favorites to appear in our lunch pails--and often, in the toes of the Christmas stockings we hung each year. Oranges had a little longer season, and grapefruit seemed most often to come onto the menu in January and February. Occasionally, grapes might be had for a price that fit our family's very, very tight budget, and they were parceled out and savored when we did have the opportunity.

But it was the memory of grapefruit for breakfast that filled my mind this morning. How often we would come down to the kitchen where my mom would have already cut grapefruits in half, using her knife to carefully loosen the sections and then sprinkling each with a lavish amount of sugar. Each place had its own half (and if we were an odd number at the table that day, the half left over would have been covered and put in the refrigerator for tomorrow), and we all ate the sections and then squeezed as much juice as possible into the bowls from which we inelegantly drank the juice. Sometimes this juice was more than a little bitter, so my sister and I were glad to share our leftovers with whoever wanted more.

At school, our teacher sometimes extravagantly brought a whole grapefruit for her lunch, peeling and eating it section by section like we ate our oranges. We often watched this in awe, both because she had a whole grapefruit to herself but, even more, because she could eat it, including the bitter membrane, without any added sugar at all!

All of these memories flooding back, just by cutting a grapefruit in half. And then, a couple more. Instead of eating the grapefruit section by section from a carefully prepared half, I used my old-fashioned manual juicer to squeeze the juice and pulp out, poured all of it into a glass, and drank it with my breakfast. And I used the whole grapefruit, not just half! I learned this habit when living in Arizona with a wonderful grapefruit tree loaded in season with bushels of sweet fruit. Nothing like going out to the backyard, picking a heavy with juice fruit and bringing it in to savor. We had so many that I had quickly learned juicing was a great way to get these on the menu more quickly and more often. I even learned how to concentrate the juice for freezing without so much space taken. Now that I am again buying the fruit, I no longer do that, but it was fun to have our own concentrated juice in the freezer when the AZ grapefruit were not in season.

There are other aromas that can sometimes surprise me with pictures of the past, and I savor every one. When Grandpa Laack had his aneurysm the loss of his sense of smell was what he mentioned as perhaps the most depressing aftermath. At times like this, when I can relish the past with my nose, I think I can understand just a little more what he mourned.