Taste memories

I've decided that "Miss" is too boring a pseudonym for the small, blonde, talking-in-sentences firecracker who bounces around our house demanding that you read her books or find her shoes. Henceforth, she will be Mabel. That's Miss Mabel to you.

I watched her put a hot pebble to her mouth on Monday, as we played in a friend's yard, in a friend's paddling pool. Instead of shouting (pointlessly), "No, yucky! Don't eat it!" I stopped a moment and thought about how stones taste. So often in an Irish summer (that elusive creature) I would have picked up a stone on Killiney Beach or Whiterock - a stone warm from the brief sun and smoothly round from years of rolling in and out on the shelving shingle, shiny bright black or matte grey with a band of white running through the middle - and brought it to my lips to taste the salt and the hardness and the nothing that stones taste of. Maybe we should all lick a (nice clean) stone now and then and remember how it feels not to be paranoid about every little thing.

I also have a clear memory of how the strap on my pushchair (that's stroller to you, maybe) tasted - a memory that had been submerged until I caught Mabel sucking on something similar one day recently. I was a thumb sucker and my kids aren't, but I think I must have swapped out the thumb for a strap at some point, because I can vividly recall how it felt to suck my saliva back and forth through the vinyl-y webbing of the strap, and how good it tasted to my two-year-old self.

It's funny that non-food taste memories are more vivid than edible ones. But then, I was something of a picky eater myself as a child. I blame my mother's bad cooking, but that's probably not all there was to it. I can remember the day I first decided that I liked peas, so I was probably six or seven before that happened - and they were definitely an early vegetable. It's possible that I existed on rice krispies and chocolate Yoplaits (in the waxy cardboard cup, remember?) and mashed bananas for many years before I became the champion all-round eater you see before you today.