The spoons are too big to eat cereal with. The ones in our drawer are, anyway, and they belonged to my maternal grandparents before they came to Melissa and me through the kind of family inheritance where nothing is chosen and one day the drawer simply contains spoons you did not buy. They are heavy and look more like serving spoons than eating spoons, but we use them anyway. One ordinary weekday morning this summer I poured cereal, took one from the drawer and ate breakfast, and before I had time to notice what was happening, I was at my grandparents’ table in Hibbing on a Saturday morning forty years ago, give or take. There was maple syrup on the cereal because that was how we ate it there. We had sugar, yes, but that was not our house style. The spoon in my hand was theirs and it may have been that exact spoon.
Usually I can feel myself reaching for a memory. Or maybe reaching is not the word, but there is an act involved, something I am doing, and this was different. I didn’t go looking for the table. It was simply there, and with it came the sunlight, the weight of the utensil in a much smaller hand and the silence of a house run by people who had been awake for hours. I was back in my own kitchen when I reached the bottom of the bowl.
The house Melissa and I live in was built in 1953 and still has the original cabinets. Everyone who has owned the place since Eisenhower has looked at them, considered the options and left them alone. We have followed their example. One drawer, however, has something none of the others do: when it opens, a strong chemical smell rises from it, unmistakably the smell of my grandfather’s dental office in Hibbing.
I don’t know what causes it. Seventy years of a drawer being a drawer, closed around its contents? Varnish from when the house was new? Old wood? I decided not to find out. My grandfather is dead and the office is gone, but the smell exists anyway in a cabinet of a house he never saw. I open that drawer for a screwdriver and end up six years old again. In the novel everyone quotes but few finish, the narrator gets his childhood back from a little cake and some tea. I got a junk drawer and a dental office.
In April, in Off Season, I wrote about melancholy catching up with me on a deck in Provincetown. I had flown there from the middle of the country and it found me anyway, bringing the wind off the bay and a lake from my childhood. That time it needed weather and a certain slant of evening sunlight. It had the decency to announce itself as a mood.
I haven’t left the Twin Cities since June, when I spent a week at my parents’ in Hibbing, sitting in the living room while they settled questions they had been carrying for sixty years. Since then there has been no deck, no bay and no wind off it, but the memories turn up anyway while I am eating cereal or looking for a screwdriver. What comes back varies: sometimes it is the farmhouse Melissa and I rebuilt in Duluth twenty years ago, the maple floors and rooms I haven’t stood in for a long time. Sometimes it is the table. Sometimes the office or the syrup. Memory researchers say that the years from ten to thirty leave more behind than other years. I was younger than that on those Saturday mornings, so I’m not sure what the research does for me here.
In the spring I called this the quiet pain of knowing that what I am living now will become a memory. That is part of it here, or I think it is, but these visits feel like more than time passing. They feel as though I am being shown something, and I do not know what to do with that.
I’m not sure why it has become so frequent. One guess is simply age.
I am closer to fifty than to forty. I don’t mean that I am old. The obvious fact is that there is more life behind me than there used to be. The harder fact is that there is probably more behind me than ahead. My personal math has never matched the population average. I wrote in So Far Away that the man I was in my twenties didn’t expect to live to thirty. This was neither hopelessness nor pessimism but a prediction. He had done the math and, according to it, he was going to end his own life. The prediction still comes up in therapy occasionally. Documented, settled, filed away.
This changes the experience in a way I didn’t understand at first. That is not quite right. The experience itself is the same, and what changes is what I understand afterward. I almost didn’t live long enough to open the drawer or to have the spoon bring the table back.
There was another part I had missed. In June I wrote about the two-person archive my parents keep, the version of their town that exists between them while they can still check each other’s memories, an archive that cannot be handed down. I didn’t understand then that I was doing the same thing alone. My mother can still tell me facts about her parents’ house, and my sister has her own version of the kitchen, but neither of them has my Saturday mornings. They don’t have the syrup, the heavy spoon in my smaller hand or the sunlight through that window as I saw it. The same is true of the office. The smell belongs to whoever opens the drawer, but the office that opens in my head doesn’t. No one else stands there exactly as I did at six.
The spoons would have survived me. That is what bothers me. Had I died in my twenties, they would have gone on being spoons in somebody else’s drawer, perhaps sold at an estate sale and carried into a stranger’s kitchen. What would have vanished was my version of the table. The plan I did not carry out had a casualty list I never bothered to draw up. The Saturday mornings were on it, and the office was there, too, along with rooms that now open only in my head. At twenty-five I thought the decision was about one person. Nobody told me how much of the past was stored under my name.
Some of these memories, not all but the ones that tend to return, are lit incorrectly. Gloriously incorrectly. My grandparents’ kitchen has late-afternoon light at eight in the morning, and the Hibbing sky was never that blue. The maple floors of the farmhouse are more golden than we made them, though Melissa and I refinished those floors ourselves, on our knees, coat by coat, and I know what color they were. The memory gives them a color we never chose. The strange part is not the brightness but the peace that comes with it. Not longing, which is what melancholy is supposed to bring. Peace. I can’t explain it, and “I get a feeling of peace, but I do not know why” is not a sentence I can leave alone.
Nostalgia is the obvious answer and may be the right one. I’ve caught my memory giving an old summer better weather because that version made a better story, and maybe that is all that is happening. But I’ve looked for a recent room with the same light and can’t find one. Recent rooms have their ordinary indoor light. A boundary seems to exist somewhere around the winter of 2020, near the diagnosis and what I later called the signing.
I’ve written about the bargain. The medication caps the highs and puts a floor under the lows, and it also left color feeling different. The first spring after the diagnosis arrived on schedule, but I didn’t feel it. That was part of the deal, and I signed it and would sign it again. The spoon gives me the kitchen I saw then rather than the one I would see now, and the drawer does the same with the office. Whatever changed about color in 2020 has not changed the light already attached to those rooms.
Maybe that is where the peace comes from. Brightness in the present makes me ask questions. Is it spring? Is it my brain? Where is this going? A memory is already over and cannot gather speed or carry itself into next week, so I can let it be bright even though I may have this wrong. Nostalgia may explain all of it and the date may be an accident. I know that, and I still keep coming back to 2020.
The cabinets aren’t going anywhere, though a responsible homeowner might have replaced them decades ago. Melissa and I refinished them a few years back. Replacing them now would get rid of the smell, and the smell has nowhere else to go.
Sometimes I choose one of the big spoons on purpose. Usually nothing happens. It works about as well as staring at a phone and willing it to ring. The table doesn’t come because I ask for it. Every so often it comes on its own, and then I stop eating and wait. The light is too bright, and I get the morning back anyway.
My grandfather’s office is gone from Hibbing. In my kitchen, a drawer still smells of it.
Quiet Mind, Loud Brain 
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