Memory by Fire

The air is cold and filled with falling snow. The sidewalk is slippery with ice and trampled snow. It's still winter. We're running through the tail end of the season all across the country. The days are getting longer and the nights shorter. The snow is thawing and freezing, thawing and freezing, starting the death throes that will turn March into April and winter into spring.

Thoughts run through my mind as I walk home one night. My stare is low, towards the ice patch in front of me. My step is careful. I walk by an old church made of boulders big enough for a Trebuchet to siege a castle. I guess I only assume it's old, because of the building material. It doesn't much matter, I like walking by to look at the rocks.

I go by carefully when I smell a smell that takes me back. It wasn't a sudden memory, it snuck up on me gradually. Before I knew it I was transferred back to my childhood. My memory was deep and vivid. I was not thinking about my childhood, I was in my childhood. I was sitting next to the woodburning stove at the farm in the cold winters of the past. The air was freezing but the fire was too hot. I rotated to keep an even warmth, too long in one position and half my body would be burnt and the other half too cold. The sight and sound were strictly from when I was young, but the strongest sense for me was the smell. It was the smell that warped me back in time. It was the smell that bridged the gap between the present and past. It was the salty, smoky smell of a fire burning in the stone church.

I came back to the current and shuffled through the ice field safely. I continued on home a little brighter, a little happier, my smile a little larger. My trip reminded me of what was and what will be and what I have now.

Sense of the City (View from the Second City: renamed)

I renamed my column for the Journal Republican to open it up to more story ideas. Also, it will be on a regular schedule, due every other Friday. Pretty excited about that.

I changed the name of this column, from View from the Second City to Sense of the City, specifically for this article. Vision isn't the only way to navigate a city. Chicago can be mapped using all of the conventional senses.

Most think of maps as the visual likeness of a specific area. They are folded up pieces of paper with colored lines and symbols representing roads, parks, "areas of interest." But the map in my head uses more than visual cues. My instinctual understanding of the area around me relies on my other senses, including smell.

I love using my sense of taste and smell. I am a foodie at heart and I am happy with the smell of a great cup of coffee or grilled hamburger or locally brewed craft beer.

Chicago is a wonderful city to navigate by the nose. What a great variety. Chicago is not really known for its chocolate factory, but there is one. Sometimes the smell of cocoa wafts downtown and catches your nose for a second.

The brownie smell is quickly replaced by something else. Sometimes it's a food smell that changes depending on the neighborhood. Sometimes it's the sickly sweet smell of a sewer drain telling us something bad is in the area. We use are noses as a physical test of an area. We are attracted to the cocoa smell and repulsed by the sewer. Some ancient piece of our brain tells us were to go based on a mostly ignored sense.

The farm smells of my childhood behave differently. The city smells seem very binary. They are either there or not. One second you smell something and the next second it is replaced with something completely different.

My White Heath farm has an amalgamation of smells. There is an ever-present smell of flowers or trees with a hint of dirt. Perhaps there is a bit of mold or rust mixed in there. Sometimes manure or diesel or exhaust. They combine to make the unforgettable smell of my childhood.

They say smell is the sense most linked with memory. For me, the smell of freshly baked bread sends me back to my childhood when there would always be fresh bread.

Sometimes my nose plays tricks on me. I often walk by Lake Michigan. Something about the water in the air or the sight of the waves makes me think I smell something that can't be there. Even though I know the lake is freshwater, I still smell almost a hint of salt in the air.

View from the Second City (Spring)

Over the past few months, I have been experiencing Chicago through my eyes to gather subjects for this column. But sight is not the only sense available in the Second City. This morning, making my way to the bus stop, I heard a sound that was almost foreign to my winter addled ears. The sound seemed to come from no where in particular--just all around. It was the sounds of birds.

These were not the coos of pidgins, or the caws of seagulls that stay in the city over the cold months. Instead they were the tweets of the little brown birds I had all but forgotten about. It was nature calling out that Spring is coming. The world is tilting closer to the sun and the weather will soon turn.

I enjoy the cold and I like the snow, but it has been a long winter and I am excited for the change over. The problem with snow is, in the warm weather, it melts. At the farm, the ground soaks up the melting snow and turns spongy and muddy. There is very little exposed soil in the city to soak up the water. All the snow that gave people so much trouble a few weeks ago, is now melting and bothering the sewer system.

I am not one to harp on the seasons. We only have four of them (some years it feels like just two) and they all have good aspects. But I am not one who abides wetness well. Puddles and standing water get my feet wet and make me uncomfortable for the rest of the day. Spring is beautiful and full of love and rebirth, but it tends to make me feel itchy. On the farm I could usually avoid the puddles, but the city is all paved over making it impossible to avoid. It turns into one big puddle.

Back home the birds appear every year, when there is a thin layer of snow on the ground and the air is warm enough to go out with no coat. It is the same in the city, but they don't come in such numbers. The trees at the farm can be full of hundreds of birds--their combined calls deafeningly loud. Here they congregate in empty lots or the odd park in smaller groups. Spring is indeed coming back, birds are migrating home, the trees will soon bud.

Thousands of years ago, humans feared the coming of the darkness. The end of the Summer and beginning of the Fall felt cold and dark and scary. The unknown made people pray for the return of spring and the rebirth of the world. Now, we kind of forgot that feeling. Technology made the long nights less scary, but our DNA still has that fear ingrained by thousands of generations. We still feel relief when spring starts and the birds sing.

View from the Second City (Lake Ice)

(This is my second column published in the paper. It was published on Tuesday.)

The beach close to my apartment turns white in the winter. Snow replaces the sand and cold pidgins and seagulls replace the crowds of summer swimmers. The fresh water of the lake freezes and extends the beach about 30 feet farther out. Walking along the edge of the water it soon becomes apparent that if it was summer and not cold and you were standing in this exact spot, the water would be over your head. The first few feet of lake is sallow enough to freeze on its own, but after 10 feet or so, the water will only freeze when the waves splash up onto the ice. The rest turns into mountains of ice formed little by little with each wave.

I braved the below freezing temperatures the other day, to see the beach. I prefer it in the winter. I think it is much more beautiful. And the waves seem much more savage. I walked through the knee-high snow to the stone edge over looking the lake. The pier, where I sat last year to watch the 4th of July fireworks, was covered in an inch of ice. Carefully, I walked to the edge of the ice embankment overlooking the water. It was slippery and I walked carefully out onto it. To my left was thinner ice and to my right was a 10-foot drop to the water, which probably was about another 10 feet to the lake bottom. If I slipped I would have been in the cold, cold water with no way out. So I stood perfectly still and watched the waves crash on to the ice. Normally in the winter, the water is rough and would be shooting up past my head. But that day was especially calm.

The lake in the wintertime makes me think of my childhood on the farm. I would play in the snow in our back yard with my older brother. Or we would walk to the family woods. Our farm, between White Heath and Monticello, was wonderfully alone. In the wintertime I could see my breath in the crisp clear air and the only sound I could hear were my boots crunching in the snow.

It is all but impossible to be alone in the city, even on the coldest day of the year. I get as close to alone as I can at the beach in the winter. My childhood self would think I was crazy for wanting to regain that feeling, Chicago was a place of excitement in my young mind, which it still is. But sometimes the excitement can become too much and all I need in the world is the natural silence of my boots crunching the snow.

View from the Second City: Beginnings

I've got a column in a paper.

It's a monthly column in the Journal Republican, my hometown weekly newspaper. I'm calling it "View from the Second City." Most people live in a small town because they don't like big cities and I'm trying to literarlaraly (*made up word) show the similarities between Chicago and Piatt county.

I'm pretty excited about it. I'll post them after they are printed so everyone can see.