The Ketchup Factory – Days Long Past

The Ketchup Factory — Days Long Past

When I was a boy, summer vacation from school started the first week in June and ended the first week of September. By the end of those three months, summer vacation seemed like it lasted forever. I became bored with it – summer was too long. I eagerly awaited autumn and couldn’t wait to get back to school – or should I say, to get back to my friends in school.

Now I’m an old man sitting here in late July, finding it extremely difficult to believe that in just a little more than a month, summer will dissolve into autumn. Winter will come in on autumn’s coattails with its bitter cold and wintry mixes of rain, sleet, and snow.

And just imagining winter’s bone-chilling breath makes my old arthritic bones ache, and my aging heart yearn.

Incomprehensibly, I find myself in the winter of my life. August is but a calendar flip away, and autumn’s colorful finale just one frosty morning away.

Autumn is a sad season — a season when bright green trees, in one brilliant last gasp, burst into yellows and oranges and reds, in an unrivaled celebration of the fierce tenacity of life.

Yet, after the leaves dance their final colorful reprise, they drop to the ground unceremoniously, broken, brown and brittle; dead before the worst of winter comes.

I find a curious, nostalgic twist in all of that — one that is difficult to describe or make tangible, perhaps because those days are long past and won’t come again, save for the memories that live in my heart.

With a soft sigh of resignation, I drift back in time and remember trucks loaded with red, ripe tomatoes, piled high and jiggling as they rattled over bumpy side streets on their way to the factory. It was a ketchup factory, where they made Vacationland Ketchup — my grandfather’s favorite, and therefore mine.

It came in oddly shaped bottles and was sold in only a few places in Ohio. It doesn’t matter anymore; Vacationland Ketchup went the way of vacuum tubes and trolley cars. But I’ll never forget it — not for how it tasted on French fries and fried eggs, but for how the factory smelled while the ketchup was cooking down.

I vividly remember waking up on a late August morning in my bedroom on the second floor of my grandparents’ house in Sandusky, windows wide open, curtains fluttering, and the smell of ketchup cooking at the factory just a few blocks away, drifting through the summer morning air. It was an early scent of autumn that swirled through that air, and it meant summer vacation was nearly over; autumn was on its way.

The smell of the cooking ketchup reminded me that it wouldn’t be long before I’d be jumping into huge piles of crispy, brown leaves in front of the houses on our street, playing and having fun as I waited with my friends for the school bus to arrive.

Not long after that, the smell of burning leaves settled over the whole city — the unmistakable smell of the seasons changing, the smell that reminded us all to enjoy those few remaining bright blue autumn days, because winter’s biting winds were waiting, still hidden away in some dark and frozen place.

I don’t believe progress always makes things better. I think we often rush ahead and leave the best of ourselves behind. Nothing reminds me of that more than the smell of a ketchup factory that no longer exists, and a boy who no longer exists — except inside me, in thoughts like these, on mornings like this one, when I can’t help but encourage myself to remember.