Today as I was loading my groceries into the van at the Superstore, I smelled pipe smoke. It’s not a smell you often encounter nowadays, but it’s very distinctive and noticeable. It immediately made me think of my mother. Every time she smells a pipe, she has to say, “Oh, I love the smell of a pipe.”

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me with the kids. I’m not sure if it’s because they are sick or because we’re all stuck in the house all the time, but I’ve been very short on patience and creativity. I find that when I get into a major funk like this, I really miss my mom. So the pipe smell almost made me cry, but I held it together because crying in -19 degree weather in the parking lot of the Superstore is just a recipe for YET ANOTHER COLD, and heaven knows we do not need more germs around here.

Anyway, my mom loves the smell of a pipe because her grandfather, her mother’s father, was a pipe smoker. So it’s a smell that reminds her of her youth, and happy times of being a kid and visiting her grandparents. I never met my great-grandfather, but now I find it really interesting that I have a positive memory that is related to him, though my mother. It’s like she has found a way to pass her own good memory on to me, creating a new, morphed good memory.

I feel like I am not explaining this very well, but it cheered me to think that there is a link to the past that is being preserved. When I look at my kids, I often feel like 75-80 years on this planet — if we are lucky — is not enough. I would love the chance to get to know all my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and to have them know me. I like the fact that little bits of myself might get passed down to them as their parents remember their parents and grandparents.

In our family, I consider it my job to be the record-keeper for our kids. Their baby books are full of extremely detailed descriptions of every milestone of their life; their weights and heights and tooth arrival dates are all noted. I take hundreds of pictures and organize and label them all every month, then provide descriptions of the events to go along with it. Maybe I should start spending some time recording our family’s older generations, too. I’d love for my kids to know what my grandparents are/were like, to know their stories.

I smell family storybook. My interest has been piqued.