Borrowed Heartbits: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes was part of the literary elite during the 19th century, a group of poets and writers who shaped American literature as we know it. Think Emerson, Thoreau, Poe... writers whose work and abolitionist sentiments grabbed at the heart of my most recent heroine, Elsie Boswell.

My yiayia passed away almost four years ago. But the memories that keep dancing in my mind are from decades before. If I close my eyes and think long enough, I can smell the simmering butter from her kitchen door, mixing with the scent of saturated leaves and overgrown grass surrounding the red bricked house as I hunted fireflies. 

My memories are only a stilled moment away.

I breathe in deep the perfume of my yaiyia's cold cream and her laundry detergent and the settled scent of a well-cooked meal hours past, while I sit in 2018 with moisturizer, unscented detergent, and an unpleasant lingering of last night's take out. Yet, something triggers, coaxes my brain to trip and fall into the nostalgia of a warmer instance.

The memories enticed by smell, have been a catalyst for nostalgia beyond my own walls. These past days have brought word that a respectable first lady has passed, and that WWII vets are quickly leaving us behind for a heavenly existence, I have been overwhelmed with a longing for things of old. Maybe it's my mid-life blip of a crisis slinging my own mortality around to mourn the precious moments gone by, the loss of story-telling, and remembering, and the never forgetting. Not only did my yiayia conjure up warmth for us in her tiny home, but she was a prevailer, a hero who escaped Nazis and started life anew in my homeland. So many stories of those who were brave, so many testimonies silenced with the last breath. I fear that remembering is losing its traction against the terrifying future, as witnesses to all the history are leaving us. 

Even so, I will not forget. I think of my own heroes that printed upon my heart as a child, rendering my tiny part of this breathtaking whole that is humanity. What thread my life is in this great tapestry! How much I wish that I didn't focus on the knots and frays, but the secure stitchings of all my grandparents offered. I shall hold all close now. I shall treasure it all the more. And as I sit and breathe in deep, welcoming the memory, the scent of times gone, I am delighted to stumble upon this affirmation:

"Memories, imagination, old sentiments...are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel." 

Mr. Holmes has blessed me today with this borrowed heartbit. He has offered truth to what I've pondered so very much in these steps tracing back to a time long gone, now stirring aromas in my heart. I pray that we never forget those who've gone before us, and fought the good fight, raced and won, and grew us up and out to a world that needs our pasts to build thoughtful, secure futures--without forgetting.