Sandra Carey Cody

Chapter Two

They say memories of smells call up the strongest emotions. Boiled cabbage, warm sliced kielbasa. Hot coffee with cream. Lilacs. Manure. Fresh paint, a lumberyard. A warm breeze in springtime laden with the smell of clean laundry flapping on the line. Just cut grass. Cement sidewalks after rain. Incense and candle wax. Pine needles. Wet sand beside a mountain lake.

It is also said our memory plays tricks on us, delivering pictures of scenes that never happened exactly that way. It shows us people who were not there that night. It tricks us into believing people were happy when they were not.

I don’t know how much of what I remember is false. Most of the people who were adults when I was young are gone now. I can’t ask them if the memories in which they play a part are true. They are true for me. What I remember has meaning. What I remember determines how I interpret life. The mental pictures I have stored illustrate what it meant to me to grow up a Polish Catholic girl in a postwar mill town in upstate New York.

I do wonder, though, about the light. I’d like to know why my strongest childhood memories are bathed in a yellow, buttery sunlight.

The image came to me on the Vrooman Avenue bus. My mother and I were seated on the sideways bench near the driver, headed downtown. We had boarded on the corner of Gorski Street, a block from our house. Now the bus was pulling away from the stop. I watched as two-story clapboard houses moved slowly past the open window across the aisle. Bus noises – a motor, gears shifting, brakes hissing – filled my ears.

"The sun is like butter," I said.

A measure of silence, then my mother smiled. "Now, what made you think of that?" I knew I’d surprised her; it felt good, strong. I had come up with something she hadn’t heard before. I sat up straighter in my seat. For the first time, I saw myself, a separate person, apart from her.

The bus passed Partyka’s Market on the corner of Lenox and Crane. I watched the market disappear from the window as the bus turned left on Vrooman and headed down the long hill. When the Irish came here they called it Cork Hill, but it wasn’t their neighborhood anymore. By now they had spread across town, their boundaries expanded, limitless. This place was called Reid Hill now, for the street running through it, but sometimes people forgot and called it Cork Hill again.

Another elevation, not far away, was also bathed in sunlight. Market Hill was named for the long street running north to the best part of town. If you lived on Market Hill, you were in management of maybe a carpet mill or the radio station or at least a shoe store. Or you had a profession. Susie Steinberg lived on Market Hill and her father was a lawyer. So did Dave Whitestone, whose dad was a doctor. Their houses had sunshine on them, too. White clapboard with wide green lawns, much bigger than the ones in my neighborhood. But I hadn’t met them yet. On the day of the bus ride with sun like butter, the world was only Reid Hill to me.

My mother said I might live on Market Hill someday. I didn’t understand what was wrong with Reid Hill except that we lived there. This confused me. We were proud to be Polish at weddings at the PNA Hall but outside our neighborhood, we didn’t want to be ethnic. We wanted to blend in, white, American, English-speaking with no strange customs or names that had to be spelled out.

The polka weddings and family parties were held on sunny days. I know this because I remember the sunlight twinkling off the highball glasses. The sun also warmed our backs and legs when Betty and I rolled down the grassy little hill in our backyard. It poured through the trees in Partyka’s Woods. And it played with the waist-high wildflowers in the vacant lot next door, the place we called The Field.

I wish I could draw in your mind a picture of that place, exactly as it was, warmly lit by a clear sunlight making sharp shadows on a concrete sidewalk. Beside the sidewalk, up to its very edge, grew clouds of Queen Anne’s lace, sky-colored chicory, purple and white clover and the flowers whose names I still don’t know, the red-orange ones my mother called firemen.

I believe the sounds and smells and the picture are the makings of my childhood solitude, protected and holy. They transformed my loneliness into a safe, enriched, alive state of being, of perfect awareness of each blade of grass and waving flower. There is a place where nature is an open-armed friend, always waiting to welcome and enfold me in its breeze’s caress, its warm sun’s kiss, its clear, illuminating light. This is the place I am from.