Last night, as I was walking the dogs, I wandered down a block of Spain Street I don’t usually hit. It’s very pretty, though stereotypical, lined with crepe myrtles, poplar trees, and a dozen brightly colored shotgun houses.
In the middle of the block, I smelled it: perfectly done fried chicken. But struck me wasn’t just the scent of the chicken; it was the smell of the kitchen, too, saturated with grease, and knowing that the woman making it–almost surely a woman–had probably done so hundreds of times before, standing in the same spot, looking out the same window at a cityscape that doesn’t change–that hasn’t changed because of poverty and neglect and now can’t change because of historic value. The night air was warm and humid, and I felt like I might have been back at my grandparents’ house 20 years ago, in the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi, rolling in the grass with their dogs, Ramses and Sheba (black labs, of course) and waiting for my grandmother to call us in to dinner.
But then, the smell could have been coming from the newly renovated the house on the corner, bought by a young couple and turned into a tony little bakery with living quarters up top. In which case, my nostalgic fantasy seems even more…well, fantastic and stupid.
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