Chapter 23 — It Is Flour

What rose out of the open bag was not sharp, and it was not chemical, and it was not frightening.

It was warm.

It was earthy.

It smelled, faintly and unmistakably, of dried nuts and toasted grain, a soft, homey, wholesome smell.

It smelled, in fact, just like my grandmother’s pantry in her old farmhouse, that particular rustic aroma of stored grain and dried goods, the smell of a kitchen where good things were made by patient hands, the safest smell I know that I had not smelled in twenty years and had not known I still carried in my memory until it came drifting up out of a Ziploc bag on my guest room floor.

There was something almost unbearably tender about the fact that the smell was my grandmother’s pantry, of all things.