Pipe Smoke and a Toilet Seat

There are some experiences in life that you never forget; they stick in your memory like freshly mown grass sticks to your feet after the evening dew. Sometimes it’s a memory that you aren’t even aware that you still possess.

Once I was with my family in Florida and we were waiting to be seated at a restaurant. There were chairs and benches outside the restaurant and while we were sitting there I suddenly smelled an aroma that was unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. Suddenly I remembered the smell and my skin prickled with goosebumps. It was pipe smoke. My great-grandfather smoked a pipe and a man a few feet down from me had lit up a pipe. The pipe tobacco smelled just like my great-grandfather’s had smelled. My great-grandfather’s name was Charles Emory Shirley but to me, he was Poppa Bear. He died when I was eight years old and the fact that 30 some years after his death a smell could trigger such powerful memories totally caught me off guard.

About five years ago we built a new house. We have electric heat but we seldom use it. Instead we use our wood burning stove that is located behind our house. It works great and our house is always warm, except for one room…our bathroom. Our bedroom and bathroom are over the basement garage (which isn’t insulated) and when it gets super cold (below 20 degrees) the bathroom is cold, and the toilet seat is miserable.

Which brings me to my second powerful memory, my grandmother’s bathrooms in the winter time. My grandparent’s house was over 100 years old and the bathroom was added on during the late 30s or early 40s. The house was not insulated and it was heated with two wood stoves, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. In the winter if you weren’t right on top of those stoves or under ten blankets you were cold. But if you went to the bathroom where there was no stove, you were frigid. Sitting on that toilet seat was like sitting on a glacier in the Artic.

Right now Kentucky is experiencing the coldest weather we have had in several years. The high Monday is in the single digits and the lows below zero. Between now and then I plan on visiting the hardware store and buying a portable heater for our bathroom but even after the seat is warm, I suspect I will still remember Grandma Layne and her toilet seat made of ice cubes.

My grandmother has been gone about eleven years now and I miss her every day…the toilet seat, not so much.