“We’re gonna be late.” My husband warned, half a block ahead of me.
“Coming!” I shouted.
Our road trip through Puglia had gone without a hitch until that day. The plan was to leave Matera in the morning, stop for lunch in Martina Franca and be in Lecce by late afternoon. But my affinity for the snooze button and a couple of missed turns meant that by the time I managed to shimmy our rental car into a model-train-set-sized parking space in Martina Franca, we were running late for our reso.
Rushing through the Baroque tangle of streets that connected one blindingly beautiful piazzas to the next, we turned a corner and I came to an awestruck halt—an archway being gently strangled by morning glories. Stunning. I wasn't always the type to stop and smell the proverbial flowers. In fact, I used to be quite the opposite—borderline-type-A-rat-racer. But after a significant health flare up in my early forties, I started meditating to manage my pain. And meditating, as it always does, led to increased present-moment awareness. And increased present moment awareness, as it less frequently does, turned me into a chronic dilly dally-er. The changes were subtle at first, but slowly I began to notice more—colours, textures, “doesn’t it look like that space heater is smiling?”. I was curious about more, followed more whims. I started to experience my surroundings in a more childlike way—it’s kinda like I Benjamin Buttoned my brain.
Martina Franca, Puglia, Italy
The archway was dripping with blooms. Like a waiter pouring wine across a table, the vines reached from one side of the street to the other. Transfixed, I took out my phone and started snapping pictures. Macro shots, wide shots, different angles, different filters. I was obsessed. My husband kept going. Used to my digressions, he threw some standard cat herder comments over his shoulder:
“Can we do this after lunch?”
…
“Aren’t you hungry?”
…
Knowing I’d catch up eventually, he turned the corner, leaving me with my beautiful mess of vines. When I felt I had sufficiently dawdled, I set out to rejoin my lunch date. But as I passed through the archway, I was abruptly confronted with another opportunity to dilly dally, a familiar smell drifting from a nearby window: stale frying oil, freshly made espresso and cigarette smoke.
++++++
With soviet era tongs, she lifts a perfectly boiled Kielbasa out of the pot and lays it to rest on one of her quintessentially old-timey plates. Freshly cooked fries tumble out of a stainless steel bowl to meet the slightly puckered sausage. The air is still thick with the smell of tired vegetable oil as she places my lunch in front of me. Then, with her heavy Croatian accent, she utters the most overused grandma word of all time:
“Eat”
I puncture the sausage casing. My Kielbasa lets out an attention seeking sigh and its juices run. I break an almost too hot fry in half, steam rises like a plume of incense during Sunday mass. My ritual complete, I devour the tube of Polish deliciousness and silently thank the French for everything they’ve done in the name of potatoes. As I chew my last bite, she asks her ridiculous question,
“You like?”
“No” I reply as I begin to clear the table. She smiles, proud of her cooking, but perhaps even more proud of the heavy slavic sarcasm she instilled in me.
“Želiš li caffè?” She asks.
“Coffee sounds great.”
She moves slowly but purposefully to the cupboard where she retrieves the tin canister marked with a cursive “C”, leaving the “T”, “F”, and “S” behind. When she manages to get the stubborn lid off, the somewhat soil-y scent of pre-ground, budget-friendly, Italian espresso escapes. The smell of stale oil now has a companion.
Before serving the coffee, she puts a pack of DuMaurier Light and an ashtray in front of me.
“Hodi pušit jedan”
I take a cigarette from the pack and light up. She does the same. We exhale in near unison and stare out the window in silence. Ribbons of smoke giftwrap the still lingering smells of fryer oil and coffee, completing the holy trinity of my grandma’s kitchen.
++++++
“Seriously. We gotta go.”
I opened my eyes to see my husband’s head poking around the corner. I snapped out of my day dreamy state but before catching up with him I thanked my pain. Without it, I would have never started meditating. I would have never started dilly dallying. I would have never been a forty-something year old lady standing alone in a back alley in Italy smelling a stranger’s kitchen. I would still be a person hyper fixated on the destination, blind to the easter eggs the journey has to offer. Then, channeling every meditation class I had ever taken, I inhaled as deeply as I could in a childish attempt to make the smell of my grandmother’s kitchen last forever. I know it sounds crazy, but I think it might have worked.