Author: Phyllis Swartz

How can it still happen?  I take a whiff, and the world seems safe again. Like it did every Monday when I was a kid, back when I was newly moved away from my cousins and grandparents, away from the dog named Rover and the Jersey cows munching chop in the dairy barn. And away from fresh mountain air.

Life was different in the city. On muggy days, factory smog hung in the air, sirens wailed by on Saginaw Street, and tap water tasted of chemicals. But something stayed the same— Mondays still smelled like Mondays. And this was my reward for lasting out each week’s first day at my new school.

The whole walk home, I’d know what was coming. I’d open the door and breathe in the familiar. The washer would chug and the dryer hum, and I’d stand there inhaling the fragrance of Tide.

Which is, of course, why I still use Tide.

Is it all in my head—the way a whiff of laundry transports me back and makes me feel safe?  Actually, yes!

The brain gives special treatment to the sense of smell. Unlike the other four senses, smell gets to bypass the regulatory thalamus and go unmodulated to the amygdala, the emotional brain, the part of the brain that holds on to memory best.

This is why you feel young again when you smell fresh-cut grass or newly baked bread or wind-blown pines. These childhood scents imprinted on your brain when the world was full of wonder, stay right there, always waiting to be unlocked again.

And when triggered, they transport you back.

The Monday smell doesn’t make the world any safer. I know this. But it feels safer.

And that counts for something.

The September of 1978 was interminable. Our baby didn’t show up for her due date on September 3. She didn’t come the next day or the next. Temperatures reached into the eighties and stretched toward ninety. The only cool place in our house was the bathtub full of cold water.

The baby still hadn’t come when my husband Steve went back to college near the middle of September. Steve said he’d call me from a pay phone after each class. Trouble was that we were counting every dime. So we made a plan. Steve let the phone ring three times. If I was fine, I wouldn’t answer, and the dime would return to Steve. If I needed help, I’d pick up the phone.

Steve used his dime all day and all week. The doctor left for vacation, and Steve kept collecting dimes from return slots. But the day finally came, and on September 23, after twelve hours of labor, I held our daughter, feeling a love for her that was deep and fierce.

Ann Marie knew the ways of a baby without needing to be taught. She held her head steady from the beginning and knew how to latch on to nurse. With dark hair long enough to braid, Ann Marie was popular with the nurses.

September of 2024 has also been interminable. The baby I held forty-six years ago, the baby with the long, dark hair, has lost it, all of it. And now she wears a hat. All through these months of treatment, I’ve watched her fight against cancer and for health with pluck and grace. She is, once again, popular with the nurses. When they see her coming, they smile.

This morning, as I write, Ann Marie is receiving her last infusion of chemotherapy. And we are grateful for her good prognosis.

My love for her that September of 1978 was fierce and deep, as it is now. But in this long September of 2024, my respect for her has grown. I’ve seen her get up in the morning and take her courage in hand to do the daily things that must be done, even when the world seems to have cracked and split in two.

When I wrote Ann Marie’s card, I couldn’t bring myself to say happy birthday. It likely won’t be very happy. She’ll still be recovering from her last infusion. But this birthday signifies something bigger than carefree happiness. It marks a year of fortitude and growth.

Kudos, Ann Marie!

“Just to let you know,” the principal said, “you’ll likely have trouble with Jake’s mom.”

Jake Jeffers was new at our school, but his mom’s reputation had preceded him.

“Try not to get sued,” the principal said as he left.

I couldn’t tell if he was serious about the suing. But he was right about trouble.

From the first phone call, Jake’s mom begged for a quarrel. I wanted to hang up. Instead, I asked to meet. And then I gathered the tools I had learned at the Corrections Training Academy.

At the academy, I was all ears. How to avoid conflict in a classroom full of inmates? I wanted to know. How to de-escalate? That, too! How to make the classroom a safe, peaceful place? Yes! Yes! Yes!

But what I didn’t appreciate then was how much that training would impact my teaching outside the prison. People everywhere, it seems, need someone to bring calm.

Especially Jake’s mom.

By the time she came along, I had circled the block more than a few times. And I had honed some strategies. In my many discussions with Mrs. Jeffers, here’s what I put to use:

Talking with her, not at her: I tried not to say things as if there was one answer and I was the only one who had it. Instead, I worked to keep our talks a dialogue, not a monologue. For my part, I took short talking turns, making bite-sized comments and asking questions instead of making assumptions.

If she went on and on, I’d break in.

“Mrs. Jeffers,” I’d say, “I’d like to cut in here. I’m curious. Could you tell me . . .”

She liked to hear her name, so she usually stopped to find what was coming next. And she took my curiosity as a compliment.

Redirecting Negative Energy: If someone throws a punch, an instructor at the academy said, you have options—slip it (get out of the way), smother it (move in on it before it develops enough momentum to hurt you), or ride it (position yourself in a way that makes the force of the punch dissipate to a tolerable level).

The instructor was describing what to do with a physical punch. But these strategies also work during verbal attacks. With Mrs. Jeffers, smothering worked best. At the first signs that she was riled, I’d move in.

“I’m curious,” I’d say. “You’ve been frustrated with every teacher Jake’s had. “I keep trying to improve my teaching, so tell me, what traits are important in a teacher?”

When I moved in close like this, Mrs. Jeffers couldn’t work up a good punch.

The school year ended, and Mrs. Jeffers never sued me. She even said once that I was a good teacher. And so, among many failures, Mrs. Jeffers became one of my success stories.

But there was an added element I put forth, one I didn’t learn at the academy, and one that was key. When my conversations were soaked with compassion and free of contempt, that’s when they worked best.

The first time I caught sight of a surveillance camera in a school hallway, my breath went short. And I was fourteen again, thrown across my bed turning the pages of 1984.

Earlier that day, my teacher Mr. Deaton had dumped a stack of Orwell’s books on top of his cluttered desk. On the cover of each book, the deep-set eyes of a ghost-like man on a big screen glared as two people ran from him in fear.

“A dystopian novel is a warning,” Mr. Deaton said as he handed out the books, “about what can happen if we aren’t careful.”

To escape the peering eyes of the ghost-like man, I shoved Orwell’s book deep into my satchel. That evening after supper and far into the night, I read with an ecstasy of fear about Big Brother. In the super state of Oceania, he monitors citizens with telescreens and microphones. In Oceania, even a tiny, facial twitch interpreted as disrespect to the Party could lead to arrest and torture.

For some reason, more than any of the other atrocities in Oceana, this surveillance frightened me most. I couldn’t fathom living under a camera. And if Orwell was right, I probably would. I counted it up. In 1984, I wouldn’t be nearly dead.

I didn’t appreciate the curtain Orwell pulled aside for me—how he sucked my innocence away, making me grapple with the ideas of censorship and unchecked power and the manipulation of truth. I’d never see the world the same way again.

It was all this teenage angst that leapt to my mind decades later when, as a teacher, I first saw that hallway camera. But to my surprise, I came to appreciate that ever-watching, never-blinking eye. The camera protected the innocent, brought help to the troubled, and decreased theft and vandalism and bullying.

Though 1984 gave me nightmares, I’m glad Mr. Deaton assigned it. Orwell’s cautionary tale taught me to be careful with power, thoughtful with technology, and compassionate in relationships.

And, yes. I assigned 1984 to my students.

In a holiday bustle of four generations, I once caught a scene. Ben’s Great-grandpa Swartz sat on our living room couch showing his age. And Ben, racing round and round through the rooms that circled the fireplace chimneys, showed his. Each time Ben passed his great-grandpa, they exchanged chuckles.

Ever since he was a babe in arms, Ben had been drawn to this grandpa. He liked to touch his big nose and his balding head and the hearing aids in his ears. And he understood early that to be heard, you had to shout.

Which is what Ben did when he suddenly halted his racing. Planting his feet on the floor and his hands on his hips, Ben gave Grandpa an appraising look.

“Why,” he said in a voice you could have heard two rooms away, “don’t you do something?”

Ben waited while Grandpa considered.

“Because,” Grandpa finally said. “I’m tired.”

Ben nodded and raced around the circle three more times. But each time he passed the sedentary figure on the couch, Ben looked more puzzled.

Then he stopped again, looking at the legs that hadn’t moved at all.

“How in the world,” he asked, “could you be tired?”

Great-grandpa opened his mouth. But nothing came out, and he shut it again. Ben waited. Still nothing.

Ben shrugged. And raced around again. But this time Great-grandpa didn’t chuckle. He barely smiled. So Ben drifted away to find a more appreciative audience.

I couldn’t blame Ben. Or his great-grandpa. Neither had the capacity to explain the differences in their metabolic rates and in the abilities of their bodies to convert food into usable energy and, most of all, in how the wear and tear of ninety-one years contrasted with three.

The young and the old are good for each other. But now and again they need time apart.

By age four, I had seen plenty of dead people. At our church, whole families went to every funeral. So lots of little kids filed past lots of coffins.

We’d stand on tiptoe to look at the dead grandmas and grandpas. They’d lie there, hands folded across their chests and eyes closed as if in deep, peaceful sleep.

They probably like it in there, I thought. They’re probably tired of creaky knees and bent backs and hobbling around with a cane.

I never once thought, though, about how these grandpas and grandmas died. Not until one sunny afternoon when I was riding my tricycle. I had just passed the milk house, when I heard a tiny scream.

On the sidewalk, a mouse writhed in pain. Under the paws of a farm cat, its grey fur was laid open. Blood stained the sidewalk.

I covered my face with my hands. But unable to look away, I peered between my fingers until the screaming stopped and the mouse went limp. And I knew the mouse was gone.

The blood could never go back into the body. Never again would the mouse take a breath or nibble on cheese or run across the grass or hide under a leaf.

I might have seen lots of dead people reposed in their coffins. But the screaming mouse awakened me to the pain of mortality. It showed me that, though death might be like sleep, as the Bible verses so often said, dying was sometimes terrible. And at the next funeral, I was not so quick to assume that dying was an easy answer for the old.

How had those grandpas and grandmas died? How would my mom and dad die? How would I die?

I went to my parents with questions about how to live with hope when I knew they would die someday, when I knew I would die, when none of us knew how we would die.

They helped me begin to understand that death is a natural part of life and that, like life, dying can be hard.

I didn’t like what I was understanding. I had hoped all the grandmas and grandpas fell gently into death without pain. This new knowledge did one good thing—made me feel more grown up. And that helped. Though not enough to keep the screaming mouse out of my dreams.

But despite those dreams, I quit asking questions. I somehow felt I didn’t want to grow up anymore. At least not for a long time.

“Don’t shoot the grandma!” the kid yells.

A few blocks into my evening walk, I’m paused uncertainly on the edge of a Nerf-gun battle that spans the sidewalk. Some kids are sprawled on the ground, apparently wounded. Or dead. But the rest are shooting and dodging and yelling.

“A grandma!” the kid yells again.

And it’s a cease fire. They skid to a stop and point their guns to the ground. They stand silent, peering at me from behind their goggles as I step over Nerf darts and around the dead and wounded. As I clear the battlefield, some call out to me.

“Have a good day,” they say.

And I do.

There’s something real nice about being my age. I’m in the phase of aging called the young-old. Coming next, around age 75, is the middle-old. And then comes the old-old, which describes my parents.

It could be that for me, this young-old stage is the best of life. No longer getting on the treadmill at 4:30 in the morning, I sleep more each night. After fending off school-room germs for so many years, I have fewer garden-variety ailments. I worry less about other people’s opinions, juggle fewer inescapable obligations, and enjoy senior discounts at restaurants. I have stories to tell and more time to chase my dreams.

But perhaps the most satisfying perk is that when I’m out and about, I keep running into kindness. People open doors and carry my groceries. They stop their cars and motion me across the street. They help me with technology. They smile and call me ma’am.

And now I’ve discovered that they even stop battles by yelling, “Don’t shoot the grandma!”

“It was sort of romantic,” my dad says. But he isn’t speaking of my mom, not this time. Instead, he waxes nostalgic about sugaring season, when nights are cold and days are warm and sap rises and it’s time to tap the maples.

In his hands my dad holds a sap pail, one he held a little over seventy years ago. We know this because right there on the pail is a message he scrawled: David is tapping. Oscar Maust and I are driving spiles. Rachel and Alan are handling sap pails. February 19, 1954.

You can find other messages like these on the hundreds of sap pails, also known as keelers, that came from my grandpa’s now defunct sugar camp. On those keelers, you can read about snowfalls and weddings and births. Here are some sample messages from the 1920s:

It was fun, my dad says, to read these words every year as he washed and scalded the keelers and loaded them into the box spring wagon to distribute among the maples.

As I read these messages on the keelers, I think of words I’ve seen carved into school desks and spray painted under bridges and marked on prison walls. I think of Facebook and Instagram, of Tik-Tok and Twitter.

We all, it seems, have the urge to leave marks behind us, to show evidence of having once been alive in a particular place at a particular time.

And I’m happy to now own the sap pail my dad holds in his hands and to hear him remember that time and place.

The other evening I set out for a sad walk, not to count my joys, but to mourn my sorrows—the cancer diagnosis of someone young and dear to me; the precariousness of life for the old, especially my parents whose knees and eyes and shoulders and body systems show their ninety years; the anguish of friends who struggle with broken relationships and poor mental health; the ravages of war; and the fractured American church.

The weight of these thoughts fell on me, and it seemed all energy had drained from my life. I must have looked like a hunched-over old woman plodding down Main. And, come to think of it, that’s exactly what I was.

Absorbed in troubles, I didn’t at first notice when a fancy black car pulled over along the road beside me.

“Mrs. Swartz, is that you?”

The voice was a little doubtful. And no wonder. I looked a hundred years older than when he had seen me last, walking school hallways with a jaunt.

It was Asher. I could still recognize his middle-school face. While I had grown old, Asher had grown up. There he was in his fancy car with his girlfriend, both of them alert, lively, and full of hope.

“Couldn’t tell if that was you,” Asher said. “But I stopped just in case. Wanted to say that you changed me from a rowdy, always-in-trouble kid to one who cared.”

Asher had just become a police officer in our town, and his girlfriend had just started medical school, aiming to be a surgeon.

“I’ll keep you safe,” Asher said, before he pulled back into traffic. “That’s my new job.”

His girlfriend leaned over him toward the window.

“And if you need surgery,” she said, “I’ll cut you open.”

Their words didn’t change cancer or old age and didn’t solve the problems of broken relationships and poor mental health and war and a divided church.

But they did change the rest of my walk.

At my age, I’m supposed to be wise. But I had been forgetting to embrace the view of the world in which opposites are joined, to see the world whole, not only with dewy-eyed romanticism or with only steel-eyed realism. I had lost track that life has two sides. One light. The other shadowed.

Like Asher, who had once brought me sorrow but now brought me joy.

On my walk home, I was still old, but no longer hunched over and plodding.