Although the thermometer belies the season, here in South Valley we hover on the threshold of fall. Pumpkins, autumn leaves and crisp, cool evenings shall soon overtake the sunny days of summer.
Recently, and quite unexpectedly, I let summer memories sweep me back through the decades to when I was a kid, out of school on vacation and visiting my grandparents in Glendale, Ariz., an older suburb of Phoenix.
It was sweltering when my parents, along with my brother and I, made the 800-mile trip from my hometown in Colorado to visit my father’s extended family in Glendale. Traveling in our non-air-conditioned Chevy, the highways in the 1950s were narrow, rough and long.
Driving to Glendale was a two-day trek, the first day being the easier of the two. My brother and I were still acting reasonably civil to one another, and our mom, always up for lunch under the sun on a blanket spread over the ground, had filled the picnic basket with egg salad sandwiches and homemade cookies. The white enamel pail, filled to the brim with ice and Pepsi bottles, nestled in one corner of the trunk. It was a feast and the highlight of the drive.
Late afternoon the second day, we reached the outskirts of Glendale, whizzing by scores of farms and fields. The scent of alfalfa meadows and orange groves greeted us while tall date palms lined the road, a whopping contrast to the evergreens and aspens of Colorado.
Eventually my dad pulled the car next to the little fence in front of their house, and Grandma—beaming in her housedress and apron, grey curls held tightly beneath her hairnet—was opening the screen door to greet us, my gentle, silver-haired grandpa right behind her.
We saw my grandparents just once a year, so it was with a celebratory spirit that the day progressed. Grandma had fried chicken cooking at the stove, apricot pie in the oven and the spotless oil-cloth-covered kitchen table set with her best dishes. Sweet tea, iced to the brim in the old pitcher, rivulets of condensation trickling down its sides, waited to quench the thirst of the tired travelers.
These days, memories of the old times, my growing-up days, come to me with renewed clarity. Is this part of getting older and being a grandparent myself, I wonder? Is this why my grandparents, who were such a part of me and who have been gone for nearly 50 years, still seem so close when a seemingly insignificant occurrence triggers a flood of memories?
That insignificant occurrence was a drive toward downtown Morgan Hill one recent afternoon. Crossing the U.S. 101 overpass on Dunne Avenue, I encountered a familiar aroma—the “Colonel” was cooking chicken. Well. There are few scents like that of the colonel’s chicken that carries me back to the 50s and my grandmother’s kitchen like those 11 herbs and spices.
I’d skipped lunch that afternoon, and dinner was a long way off. In my spontaneous, “I’m-not-even-thinking-twice-about-this” way, I pulled into the drive-through where I ordered a piece of chicken. Original recipe. No sides, thank you very much.
My grandmother fried her chicken until it was “brickly” (her own made-up word), and it was the best thing around. The chickens were young and fresh from her backyard chicken coop where she kept some laying hens, and the rest, well … they’d had a good life and then one really bad day when Grandma carried her little hatchet back to the chicken yard.
Taking my boxed chicken from the drive-through around to the parking lot, I slid down the windows, cut the car’s engine (and air conditioning), closed my eyes and inhaled. Right back to Grandma’s house. I enjoyed that chicken in the 94-degree afternoon heat because that’s the way we ate chicken at Grandma’s house. With sweat glistening on our faces, cooling our cheeks with fingers made cold by glasses of icy sweet tea—it was an experience as close to heaven as one could get.
Summer may be waning once again, but that nostalgic scent of the colonel’s chicken on a hot summer day still carries me home.
