The Smell of Cut Grass and Pancakes

Photo by kian zhang on Unsplash

Ordinary Sundays Become Sacred Memories

Whenever I smell the scent of newly mowed grass, I remember Sundays on Hearn Street. It would smell sticky-sweet, and it was moist as if it had rained that morning, even if it hadn’t.

Sundays were special. They were the only day my Dad didn’t go to work. My mother would hush us all morning and kick us out into the yard so my father could sleep in. Every other day, he would rise at 5 a.m. and go to bed at 1 a.m. after a day of working two jobs. By 6:30 a.m., he would be at work as a stock clerk at Hewlett-Packard. The storage rooms were his office, lined with computer parts, each with its own 12-digit number. He would take counts of each bit and byte and record where they would be shipped in the future. He’d drive home at 3 p.m. to have dinner and change. By 6 p.m., he would be on the night shift in the produce department of Star Market, a few miles from our house.

He was always so proud of how that department looked. Pristine, with all the vegetables lined up neatly in their baskets and the fruit shining under the plastic wrap. He greeted each customer with a smile and, using the English he had learned, he’d joke with them and they would smile and chat with him as he continued his task of keeping everything in orderly rows on the counters.

The store would close at 10 p.m., and he would sweep the floor, leaving everything sparkling and ready for the next morning. By midnight, he was home getting ready for bed. We were all asleep by then. Years later, my mother would tell me that he would enter our room and spend a few minutes simply watching us sleep. Then he would go to bed.

We would always have a late breakfast on Sunday. Pancakes with fruit and maple syrup were our favorite. My mother would take out the special pancake pan before she shooed us out of the house. We knew that once my father woke, we’d be called into the house for our family meal before a day’s work in the yard.

I still remember the roar of the lawn mower as it cut through the overgrown grass leaving a trail of green mush behind it. Armed with rakes, my siblings and I would clean up the remnants of the cut grass, filling garbage bags, and then we’d line the chain-link fence with them for Monday’s trash truck to come and take them away.

In the afternoon, my mother would come out with lemonade and biscuits, as well as homemade grape jelly made from the big purple grapes growing on the vine over our patio. Not only did the vine provide the jelly, but also the shade under which we would gather, celebrating a day’s work together.

One time, when we were helping to pick the grapes, my brother was stung by a wasp. His ring finger swelled up. My father came out with a saw and I thought for sure he would saw off my brother’s finger. Instead, he sawed off the ring and the swelling subsided. My brother kept his finger and from then on, we all wore gloves when we harvested the grapes.

Every Sunday was the same, except on Catholic holidays, when we would dress in recycled Easter clothes for Mass at Sacred Heart. You could say we were fair-weather Catholics, attending Mass on special occasions, while the rest of our Sundays were devoted to our family and yard work.

Perhaps our devotion wasn’t the typical kind of dressing up for church to show off to our neighbors or to hear the “good word.” Our devotion to each other was rooted in our own traditions, which began in Colombia, my parents’ home, where Sundays were about family.

Those memories seem so distant now. My parents have died, and my siblings and I no longer live close by. Time seems to rush by, and Sundays are lost to schedules and catching up on the undone of the week. Yet anytime I smell newly mowed grass, time stands still, and I’m transported to a simpler time when Sundays were about pancakes, biscuits, and grape jelly, and a yard on Hearn Street where a small family gathered to work and play.