The older I get, the more I understand that time has a scent.

For me, time smells of browned butter and sugar melting into something golden. It smells like vanilla slipping through warm Savannah summer air and cinnamon settling into the curtains. It smells of my grandmother’s kitchen on a Saturday afternoon in 1998.

Grandma, or, G-Ma as I always called her, was not a subtle woman.

She wore oversized turquoise colorful rings on nearly every finger, bangles that clinked like wind chimes when she stirred, eye glasses of rainbow colors with sharp cat eye rims, and house dresses that looked like they’d been stitched from the curtains of a bohemian caravan. Her hair—silver and defiantly wild—was always pinned up with two bright, mismatched chopsticks she claimed she bought in Chinatown in the seventies, though no one in the family could confirm the truth of that story. She always smelled faintly of rosewater and fresh linens being dried in the scorching Savannah heat, and whatever mysterious perfume she had found that morning.

Her kitchen was an organized chaos of copper pots, chipped ceramic bowls of all colors and patterns, mixers here and there, and recipe cards stained amber with vanilla. There were magnets shaped like fruit crowding the refrigerator and a radio permanently tuned to true southern jazz that hummed softly in the background. The oven door squeaked when opened, like it was clearing its throat before an epic performance.

I must have been no more than the age of five the summer I decided I was her “official taste tester.” She took the title more seriously than I. She would hand me the wooden spoon—heavy, chipped, and worn smooth by decades of stirring—and say in her classic southern drawl, "Quality control is the most important job in this house.”

Her trick was to use a warm bowl. The butter would drip down the sides when it hit the warmth of her mixing bowls and the sugar rained down like soft white sand. When she cracked eggs one-handed against the rim, I would watch in amazement. Flour dusted the air, the chairs at the bar, and over the tile floors catching sunlight that streamed through lace curtains and making the whole kitchen look like a snowflake.

But it was the moment the cookies began to bake that sealed the memory into permanence.

The smell would rise first—sweet, toasted, buttery—and it would crawl down the hallway, slip into closets, curl around couch cushions. It filled every corner of the house like a warm blanket. Even now, decades later and since moved from Georgia, when I catch that scent drifting from a bakery window, I am instantly five again, feet dangling from a too-tall bar chair, chin barely reaching the counter, yearning for some of G-Ma's cookies.

G-Ma never set a timer, she knew they were done by the way the air smelled, "Toasted to perfection—warm and golden, never burnt" she'd always remind me.

We would sit at her small round table—paint chipping at the edges—newspapers and old magazines scattered on every inch, and eat them too hot, burning our tongues and laughing about it while we breath like dragons. She’d tell stories about her childhood during the war, about dancing barefoot in the rain, about mistakes she made and lessons she learned and how she and my G-Pa met. She spoke as if life were a long, slightly messy recipe—improvise when needed, add sweetness when you can—but don't ever forget the salt, and keep working at it because nothing is ever perfect.

I thought back then I was memorizing her recipies to pass along to my own children when that time came. I didn't realize that I was memorizing her.

The way her bracelets chimed and grazed the bowls.

The way she wiped flour on her hip instead of a towel and always tossed the extra salt over her shoulder for a bit if extra good luck.

The way she looked at me as if I were something she’d baked herself—carefully, lovingly, intentionally.

Now her kitchen belongs to someone else. The turquoise rings are tucked into my jewelry box, the wooden spoons carved away at on my kitchen counter. The random perfume bottles sit on my dresser, empty but still faintly fragrant if I hold it close. How I miss her.

And sometimes, when I bake cookies in my own quiet kitchen, I don’t set a timer either.

I wait patiently, and the scent tells me more than just that the cookies are ready — it tells me G-Ma is beside me.

And for a moment, in the hush between the oven’s hum and the soft settling of warm dough, I swear I can hear her bracelets clinking, approving of my technique.