Bits of Place Recovered Around the City, Photo by Sarah

Today smelled like Mexico.   Smell is the most primal of the senses in triggering nostalgia.  A smell brings on a literal nostalgia assault; you can’t look away from it, spit it out, plug your ears.  You’re just going to have to remember.  Yesterday smelled like Madison, like summer in Madison.  It smelled almost exactly like what it used to feel like to walk around Capital Square at seven o’clock in the evening, going to meet friends for beers, the air so light with the scents of lake and trees and summer.  It was hard to believe I was in Mexico, the scent felt so much like a temperate Northern summer.

But today felt and smelled like Mexico, so much so that I’m at pains to describe why.  I’ve lived here for so long now – or what feels like so long – that it’s easy to forget I actually live in Mexico.  Ah yes, Mexico.  But then sometimes I walk out the door and there it is – some sense of Mexicanness innately present there in the air, in the afternoon, in the smells.  The peeling walls are Mexican, and the people, and the cars and streets and sky, but that’s not what makes a particular day feel Mexican.  It’s something else, less definitive, the smell that makes the difference.  And no, it’s not rotting garbage or warm pine trees or tacos on the grill or the suffocating cologne of macho men.  It’s quite possibly all of these, but not definitively.  Maybe it’s always there and it’s simply the question of my sensibilities being lined up just right, so I get access to it.

In any case, today I thought, wow, I’m in Mexico.  Walked the dog around the city as usual, a protest march of Communists and moto-taxis which Mexicans  watched indifferently from the street corner, waiting to cross, and which gringos took excited, flustered pictures of – “look, here it is, the revolution, and we’re in the thick of it!!”  The moto-taxistas whistled and honked and offered the dog and I a ride, and I felt cynical looking at the thin British tourists in their Vans and striped t-shirts crouching down to take photos.    Passed the same fruit guy with a scrunched russet face and we exchanged our sideways hellos, passed a few friends on the andador turistico, admired the light and the complex clouds and the intermittent rain, composed some ideas for photos of gravel parking lots and crumbling walls, and came home.

Who knows what tomorrow will smell like.  But today, either because of some otherworldly shift of the elements, or because of some personal opening up, it smelled like Mexico.  And I got to really feel it again, living here, got to be fully present in it.  In fact, tomorrow, I might even go to the market for churros.