40 Years

Smell and taste are the memory senses. I was walking yesterday along 79th and passing a young Hispanic, Indian features like the Altiplano. Maybe him, maybe his clothes, maybe just some quirk from a nearby building, but suddenly and for only an instant I was back in the Chilean campo, entering invited the mud and thatch home of a Mapuche family, from the cold and damp outdoors to the smoke and scent of humans in layers of clothes in a very small space, a smell of stinging sweetness. All there again yesterday, after forty years and then it was passed and the museum was ahead.