San Ignacio, Belize We are staying at the Venus Hotel in San Ignacio, Cayo District, near the Guatemalan border. It's a simple place (though for New Year's Eve we checked into the super-nice Family Suite). The free breakfast is also very modest: bread, margarine, jam, peanut butter, bananas, toast, biscuits, coffee, and tea. This morning as I opened the loaf-of-bread shaped Tupperware to get some bread out, I caught a whiff of "blah white bread," and I was ABSOLUTELY transported to summer 1977 when I visited my aunt and uncle in Barbados.
Smells often have the power to transport me. The mere wisp of a smell will take me back decades in time or continents away. I caught a whiff of coal smoke the other day, and it was Nanjing in 1987. But what's particularly striking about today is that that white bread is so bland and flavorless it's amazing that it has ANY smell at all. And yet, in an instant I was 11 and sitting in my aunt's breakfast nook in an old plantation house in Barbados. Though perhaps I was remembering Girl Scout summer camp in the 70s...
