Raw plants bulged from oversize garbage bags or cured on wire racks until the leaves crumbled in my fist with an autumnal crunch sticky buds left fairy-dust crystals on coffee tables avocado-green dust billowed around my dad’s lanky frame as he ground marijuana in a food processor and then cranked it through a flour sifter with a chk-ah, chk-ah rhythm. I’d know it anywhere.Ĭannabis was all over our house. Now add butter, Baker’s chocolate, and gas from an antique oven. (This was before hybridization created strains smelling of girl scout cookies, cheddar cheese, and blueberry muffins.) The odor was round and earthy: notes of crushed ponderosa pine needles, redwood tree bark, algae from the lazy Eel River, dust kicked up from dirt roads. My folks used outdoor sinsemilla grown in secret gardens on sunbaked hillsides in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. The aroma of our bakery is sharp in my mind. I somehow understood, even then, that my mom and I belonged to our community we were part of the city’s fabric. It’s a peculiar type of nostalgia, undiluted, different from my remembrances of later years. But something from these early outings stays with me. I was too young for specific memories then. Customers fawned over me while my mom did her deals. Hours later, she’d collect the bag again-now full of cash. At a café called the Village Deli, my mom would leave a bag holding hundreds of brownies with the manager, who sold them over the counter. Harvey Milk’s camera shop and campaign headquarters was a weekly stop, as was the home of Sylvester, the disco star. Rather than selling to strangers, she served a regular clientele that worked in restaurants, boutiques, and offices on her route. Mom hung duffel bags of brownies from the back bars of my stroller and wheeled me through the Castro. On weekends, salespeople fanned out into the city.
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