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Every day, by smelling roses and marigolds, I found my grandmother, whom I lost twenty-four years ago. It turns out that creating a new memory is like finding an old one at the same time, and that's how it's done. As I run my hands over the petals of the marigolds, my grandmother comes alive and well, and what I'm doing, the place I'm in, becomes more beautiful. I don't know, maybe it's not just the scent that brings her to me. Trying to find those few roses that smell in a garden with hundreds of roses every day. Moreover, the roses on the same rose bush don't smell the same at every stage of their life. Apart from newly bloomed, fully bloomed, and faded roses, the scent changes according to the time of day and even the seasons. And the garden changes like this every day, the rose bushes are pruned frequently in addition to their seasonal cycle... Perhaps it's necessary to remember to find that memory that touches your soul among thousands of changing memories, first and foremost. Among a thousand roses, only three usually smell good...
Is it strange that I'm only now realizing that I remember my grandmother, who loved to smell roses and marigolds, and the person who taught me to smell roses and marigolds, by smelling roses and marigolds? Or perhaps it's too early, but a perspective on the past that only develops in old age? But as I said, this isn't a nostalgic endeavor, it's not about reclaiming the past, it's about recognizing a new life without giving up what's important...
And there's the smell of sourdough bread. It's in this neighborhood. That's also in my memory. All this was happening in Erdek, even though my grandmother and I were mostly side-by-side in Ankara, it seems we found each other in Erdek. But this is deep Ankara, Keçiören, a place we didn't walk together – but we traveled around by bus. How is that possible?
While searching for the answer to this question, I felt like I understood the Orientalists for a moment. You find what you once shared not in the places you used to share, but in foreign places, in worlds where modernity transforms things so rapidly. Not because those foreign geographies haven't changed, as the Orientalists imagined, but because they haven't changed as modernity has...
Of course, it goes without saying that Orientalists don't look for their grandmothers in the East, do it? That's the strange thing: they both escape from modernity sweeping everything away and open themselves to this transforming machine by declaring the places they go to as unchanging...
Did I save myself this way, I wonder? At least because I found my grandmother not in immutability but in transformation? Or, as Eda said, perhaps my grandmother saved me by teaching me from the very beginning to run my hands over the velvet petals, to identify the rose's scent with my eyes and feel it with my nose, doing it hundreds of times just by being with me, without leaving me outside - she was very serious, unlike me, she wouldn't gently lick the water droplets that touched her mouth - I think that's what saved me.
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