Scent of Ceylon
From its circa-1850s store front, the Spice House sends sweet and spicy scents sailing down Old World Third Street. Within feet of the threshold, I’m caught in a tailwind of aromas. After five minutes inside the shop, spices from Morocco to Madagascar have saturated my clothes and hair. Glass jars with heavy lids keep these precious substances from overtaking one another – hundreds of spices cohabitate in this United Nations of shops – but their powerful aromas don’t stay contained. They roam in an international dance of redolence.
I unfold a scrap of paper, listing the reasons I’m here. Cinnamon is at the top. It seems like an eternity I spend in front of the jars of this lovely sweetbread of spices. The names printed on the jars: Ceylon cinnamon, Indonesian Korintje cassia, China Tung Hing cassia and Vietnamese Saigon cassia. The clerk removes the lid of the Ceylon jar and I lean in for a whiff. More than a whiff, really – a slow, soft intake of air. The scent is delicate, sweet and, for a moment, citrusy. Once I’ve made my choice (the spicy, heavier China Tung Hing cassia), I set aside my list and just roam the store, smiling when I recognize the piped-in song following me from jar to jar: “Bittersweet” by Big Head Todd and the Monsters.
The Spice House has the austerity and warmth of a pantry. Every summer when I was a kid, my mom canned pickles, vegetables and fruit, lining up the hermetically sealed Mason jars on rudimentary wooden shelves – shelves similar to the ones I now see holding jars of star anise and dried pasilla peppers. The brittle-looking, dark-purple pasilla pods, as thin as cellophane, smell like earth, the sun and a sweetness that comes with age.
In a barrel by the counter are bags of candied ginger. Lumps, nuggets and slices that look like sparkly, honey-colored jewels. A little sign next to a plate of these gems tells me I’m welcome to sample them. After the sugary beginning on the tongue, they finish with a pronounced sting. I look up to see the clerk smiling at me. “Have everything you need?” he asks. Yes, everything.
– Ann Christenson
Full Throttle
Bikers aren’t supposed to acknowledge pain. The code of the road. So when I’m smacked in the face by a high-velocity June bug, a wicked insect fastball, I stubbornly refuse to rub the sore spot. It hurts like hell, but hey, when you’re skimming along the skinny blacktop at full throttle, your shit is in the wind, as the biker philosophers say.
Everything hurtles at you – weather, traffic, potholes, bugs – and the risk and speed concentrate the mind, quickening the senses. I’m present in the moment and exposed to the elements – to balmy summer breezes and pitch-black moonless nights, to the pin-prick pummeling of a rain shower and the wind-shear force of a semitruck as it rumbles past. I’ve ridden in a hailstorm and blast-furnace heat, sure that the asphalt below me was melting, and I’ve barreled down a washboard gravel road until my fillings nearly shook loose. Wisconsin has so many kinds of weather and so many types of roads, there’s always something new over the horizon.
High in the saddle, the sights are unimpeded, unobscured, clearer and richer than any view through tinted glass. Every angle becomes panoramic, a real-life IMAX show. Gliding beneath the canopy of an old-growth forest or following the sweeping curves of a lakeshore highway is the closest thing I know to freedom.
Even with a helmet on, sounds are especially vivid. A barking dog as it chases a laughing child around a tree is an unscored soundtrack, a staccato receding melody.
But for me, the best are the smells: the fragrance of clover and wood smoke, street tar and fresh paint, mowed grass, diesel fuel, and the pungent traces of nitrogen fertilizer and cow manure from a newly plowed farm field. The smell of worms after a thunderstorm transports me instantly to summers of my youth.
The road even has a taste. Sometimes the air is so thick and dewy I can swallow it. Road dust and raindrops drizzle down my face and onto my lips, connecting me to the earth I travel. And if I forget to keep my mouth shut, that vagrant June bug ends up an unexpected snack, gritty against the throat.
– Kurt Chandler
Espresso Night
The shift starts slowly at Mimma’s, we servers in our clean white shirts and neckties gathering by the cool of the air-conditioned bar to taste the new wines – a crisp, clear Sauvignon Blanc, an earthy Merlot. Empty tables gleam with polished silverware and fresh linens, the mustard-hued napkins fanned like yellow birds about to take flight.
The first customers arrive, coming in from the heat of the sunbaked street: tanned women in sundresses accompanied by upscale men, middle-aged business associates who settle in to linger over a $60 bottle of wine; the cork pops with a satisfying thud. The pace quickens. A table of 12 sits down and suddenly the beeper at my waist is buzzing with orders up in the kitchen. I rush back and forth, serving, fetching, cleaning, wiping, the heat of the stove and the cooks in a symphony of movement, flames, pristine plates arranged with artful presentation and trays of clean glasses coming out of the washer to cycle back out as soon as we can turn the tables over. The cappuccino machine whirs and sputters as chefs call to each other, servers and bussers trotting in and out, the kitchen door swinging incessantly. Sauces sizzle in the pans as the cooks deftly flick their wrists, sliding pastas onto waiting plates – order’s up; get it quick! I scoop the chunky cioppino into a smooth bowl and inhale the garlic warmth. Rich tiramisu drenched in chocolate sweetness waits to be paired with a bitter espresso and taken to expectant diners. Out in the dining room, votive candles flicker to the beat of dozens of conversations. A packed house: a giggling group of women in town for a convention, a party of Australians who leave without tipping (don’t they know how it works here?), and a lone guy at a table for one reading a thick novel as he scoops the spaghetti alla carbonara into his mouth.
The crowd at the bar is now several people deep, Mimma herself circulating among the regulars, jovial but imposing with her dark hair and penetrating stare. Even as she laughs and chats up customers, her eyes sweep through the place, looking for problems. A generous tipper at the bar hands me a cool $20, making up for the Aussies who stiffed me. The night moves quickly. I nearly fall on my butt carrying out trays of heavy glasses to reset all of the tables for the next day. I change out of my work clothes, heavy with food aromas and sweat, and head outside onto Brady Street, where I’m greeted by the soft, soothing night air. My feet are throbbing and I’m exhausted, but still buzzing. Tomorrow I’ll arrive crisp and clean, and it’ll start all over again. But for now the night is mine, thick with reverberating sensations, the summer I turned 24.
– Julie Sensat Waldren
Cold Comfort
My bike looks like some patriotic piñata: red, white and blue tissue streamers woven through the spokes, miniature American flags pinned to the handlebars, stickers covering the frame. As we crawl along the route, the streamers fluttering and cracking in the sharp morning air, the whole neighborhood is congregated curbside – cheering, waving flags and snapping pictures. It feels good, like a returning astronaut being showered in ticker tape. But my 8-year-old mind is concentrated on one thing – the ice cream at the end of trail.
As we arrive at Lake Park, there it is: picnic tables stacked with Cedar Crest sundae cups, softening in the summer sun. I throw my bike to the ground, grab one, and peel off its slippery foil top. The Styrofoam container is cold in my hand, the ice cream hard at the center and melty at the sides. A band is playing John Philip Sousa as I dig into pure vanilla with a little wooden paddle. It’s chalky, but creamy on the tongue, and the chilly sweetness overpowers the woody blandness of the spoon. It tastes like July Fourth, as patriotic as all the streamers in the world.
– Evan Solochek
Chasing Light
Officially, it’s exercise. Rollerblading along the lakefront, from the Calatrava to the concession stand at Bradford Beach, up and back, up and back, three circuits or four, you feel it in your butt and in your hamstrings and in your lower back and your thighs. Push and glide, push and glide, holding in your belly, swinging your arms for balance. It’s a good burn, but that’s not the only reason to be here
at dawn.
Like Monet, you’re chasing light. You arrive when the sky is still blue-black, the trees only a dark rumor, park near the lagoon, strap on your Rollerblades, and that first stride, in the gray light and the cool morning air, is like the first pedal of a bike ride, the first glide at a rink – uncertain, yet thrilling you with power, freedom, release. You’re grinning and you don’t know why.
There’s almost no traffic yet and you pretty much have the lakefront to yourself. In spring and summer, it’s quiet enough to hear the gliding hum of your wheels. In autumn, you can hear leaves ticking through the trees as they fall, skittering in front of you. You pass a few dog walkers, runners, strollers, bikers, but for long stretches it’s just you, a scattering of gulls and geese, the bluff dark on one side of you, and on the other the grass, the sand, the sky and the lake.
Lake and sky are at first nearly the same hue, a beaten blue-gray, the lake completely still or sometimes shimmering like wrinkled tinfoil, the horizon barely discernible until the mottled sky lightens, goes almost white-pale, then slightly salmon, the sun a kid’s rubber ball rising from the water. Then sunlight seems to burst across the water, shoots high up the bluff, washing everything a startled yellow, throwing everything – bluff-top high-rises, green trees, pewter light poles and the masts of boats in the marina – into vibrant relief against a porcelain-blue sky. It’s as though everything has suddenly come back into itself, the world has been made, once again, solid and physical and whole, and you want to slow down to take it all in and you want to go faster because you, too, have just come back into yourself. You’re breathing hard, you’ve just been made whole, and you’re exhilarated.
Traffic picks up along Lincoln Memorial Drive – early birds going to work – and soon you will be, too, but for now you’ve got another 20 minutes of gliding long and hard and steady, and the light is lovely, and this, you tell yourself, the sun warm on the side of your face now, this is why you love to live in Milwaukee.
– C.J. Hribal
The Big Game
Three steps from my car and it already feels like fun. Parking lots are a smoke-filled circus of tailgaters, thick with the sumptuous scents of charred brats, basted burgers and a splash of spilled beer. Baseball has survived Jack Frost’s fists. It’s the home opener at Miller Park.
Through the monument’s gates, past the high-pitched dings of electronic ticket scanners and the clanking turnstiles, and the race begins. I sidestep the slow-walking masses of swaying people with their swaying brews and the jersey-clad kids with mitts in hand to finally come in sight of the field, a green-floored, airy expanse capped by that impossibly large dome. I’m hoping for a goosebump moment, some memory to stay with me ’til Social Security.
The vendors wear astonishingly fluorescent yellow T-shirts (the better to spot after your sixth beer?), and in the third inning, I shout “Cracker Jack!” at one of them. He stops, swivels his head to find me, and the transaction ensues with nary a word. I rip open the bag and munch the sweet caramel-coated treasure. My fingers get sticky. Kernels stick in my teeth. I’m a 6-year-old at my first baseball game again.
And I’m not alone. Where else do two 50-something ladies wear blue foam- rubber crowns with PRINCE stenciled across them and giggle like schoolgirls? Where else do 40,000 adults root for giant racing sausages?
In the fifth inning, the Brewers are rallying. Scoreboards flash a bright blue strobe light with a one-word message: Noise. An electric guitar screams over the loudspeakers. Moments later, Milwaukee scores a run, and fans needn’t be asked for noise. They rise to their feet as one in a cacophony of cheers.
Some stay standing as Prince Fielder comes to the plate. But the mighty man’s swing misses, and we children exhale a prolonged “Ooooohhhhh.” The scoreboard says “Get Loud” while a drum beat elicits rhythmic clapping. A cavalry horn sounds twice, inciting the requisite yells of “CHARGE!” Fielder rips a pitch into center field. Another standing ovation, with fans waving white towels, and high-fives slapping indiscriminately. Nobody’s a stranger. A lady yells, “World Series here we come.”
A pitching change calms the mood, but not for long. Because Bill Hall, who’s already homered once today, comes to bat again.
And launches a three-run shot into the second deck.
It’s a majestic blast, carving splendidly through that airy expanse and landing just short of Bernie Brewer’s gleaming yellow slide. Bernie and his handlebar mustache skim down it as golden fireworks explode just beneath the dome. Hall circles the bases amidst screams and shouts and high-fives. The cheering doesn’t stop even as he’s in the dugout and Corey Hart is at the plate. The fans are going crazy; they want a curtain call from Hall, and they keep up the din for a full minute until Hall finally re-emerges with a sweet wave to the crowd.
Goosebumps.
– Howie Magner
