Nostalgic, Very

My husband and I stopped at Dairy Queen the other day. You know, the Queen of all fast food restaurants that we systematically avoid at almost all cost, the one with mediocre burgers, mediocre fries, the famous home of Orange Julius, that place. Like I said, we are mostly fast food snobs and will rather pack a lunch than eat at A&W or similar. But this day we stopped at Dairy Queen. 

For ice cream. I ordered a cookie dough blizzard. I know that a commercially mass produced ice-cream with hopefully salmonella-free chunks of plastic-tasting beigeness is actually not that appetizing. But to me it was delicious. I almost always order that same thing if I go to DQ for ice cream, which is, I have to admit, pretty rare. And as we drove down the road silently enjoying our ice-cream I realized why I like this ice-cream. This is the ice-cream of my childhood. Those familiar flavours on my tongue invoke the emotions of my childhood, ones that, at the time, I was not actively aware of or able to articulate. Things like inattention to the worries and responsibilities of adulthood and  visceral joy as yet unadulterated by the sorrows of the world. Things like a deep delight over a simple shared cookie dough blizzard. 

When we were kids my dad used to take us for ice cream as a treat. When we were really little we’d order one blizzard for every 2 or 3 kids and then spend the next 15 minutes arguing good naturedly (as I remember it; contact my mom and dad to confirm) about who was taking more bites and complaining that we weren’t getting enough chunks of cookie dough. 

For some reason it’s small routine moments that bring back memories from my childhood and, with each of those memories, comes a flood of the emotions that went along with the scene . Here’s a few more that I’ve been thinking of lately. 

My 10yo brother in law asked me the other day to tell him about the creepiest thing I had ever heard. Without even thinking, I told him that an elephant trumpeting into the twilight  had to be close to the top of that list. But there’s another thing I’ve been thinking of since then that was also creepy. Or maybe creepy isn’t the word, but, at the time, it sent shivers of fear to my very core. It was the strangest night of my teenaged life when I awoke to the sound of a newborn baby in our kitchen and got up to see my mom pacing the floor with a heartbroken baby boy who had been born hours earlier and immediately left motherless. The moment I heard that cry, before I even stumbled out of my bedroom to investigate the cause, I knew something horrible had happened.  To this day, the cry of an occasional newborn will elicit the memory of what was perhaps the first time I experienced emotions in such intensity: fear, the key emotion, with confusion and awe and heartbreak close behind. 

A certain smoke smell on the air in fall transports me to stolen moments behind the garden shed, covertly stuffing dry leaves into  the coals from Bambi Mavuto’s morning tea fire, trying to coax it back to life for some mud and water baking project. Without my mom seeing me. And when I remember this, I momentarily feel like I did then: sly and carefree and blistered from my carelessness with fire. 

Sometimes the musky sweet smell of a certain essential oil drags me back to sultry African nights when the air in our yard was heavy with the smell of the queen of the night bushes, and my mind echoes with sleepy goodnights of leaving supper guests and the extreme joy of just being a kid growing up in Africa.

 Each of these small awakenings of my senses is so intense it can almost carry me away from reality for a second. And sometimes I let it. Cos it’s kind of nice to remember.