I Slapped

I slapped a pound of bacon (probably 12 oz, the new pound) into a piping hot iron skillet and was overwhelmed with the smell of my grandmother cooking in her tiny apartment on Howard Street in Indianapolis, 55 yrs ago or more, it was a lovely rush of memory. Smells are so special. Several times since my dearest granny has been gone, my first real loss in my life, I would buy a jar of Pond's Cold Cream just to smell it and be brought back in time to her nightly ritual of cleaning her face with Pond's. But the bacon? A complete surprise. There was a special smell in the apartment building of all the combined cooking combined with my grandmother's waxing and cleaning of the stairs to earn money to buy 12 of us cousins identical Christmas gifts, you know, socks and panties. It turns out to be the combination of the hot iron skillet and the bacon, I don't have the scrubbed waxed wooden stairs with the black rubber treads.