Two things happen to me every August.

1. I get a stern talking-to by my dermatologist, Dr. Bentz, for too much sun exposure.

2. I flashback to getting sunburnt at my Grandma and Grandpa’s beach house.

It’s the smell that brings brings me back every time.

On a stroll around Noank recently, the smell of tomatoes plants being watered, the wet soil, the salty ocean, and garden basil all lingered in the heavy, humid air. Suddenly, I was a little kid arriving at my grandparents’ house by the beach in East Haven for Sunday dinner. Grandpa was deep within the greenery of vegetables in his bright chain-link fence enclosure, spraying them with a hose. He’d come out and then teach me how to direct a gentle stream to the base of the plants, neat rows of tomatoes, pepperul’, (peppers), mulangnam’ (eggplant), lettuce, zucchini, cuguzz’ (squash), beans, broccoli. No weed in sight, just perfectly spaced plants and rich black soil under a blistering sun.

I’d spray the plants and spray myself to cool down. When Grandpa wasn’t talking and the water wasn’t spraying, you could hear the ocean on the other side of the house, a slow thrumming lullaby. The salty-seaweed air and slippery rocks wafted their perfume to mix perfectly with the baking sand, scalding driveway and the smell of garden and wet soil and fresh grass.

Then, Grandma Mary’s kitchen scents — simmering onions and tomatoes and basil and sausage, and stuffed, baked clams — wafted over to make my tongue tingle and my stomach yearn. No one ever could make tomato sauce like Grandma Mary. My mother tried, asking Grandma, “Ma, how much salt?” or “How many onions?” Grandma would smile her beautiful smile and say with her inimitable accent to use “giust’ enough”.

Every Italian cook in my family – my mom, my aunts, cousins, uncles, my wife— has his or her own signature flavor to Sunday pasta dinner. Like most Italian kids who spent every Sunday of my childhood eating pasta at some relative’s house, I am a connoisseur of pasta. And I still have never tasted a pasta sauce more delicious than my Grandma Mary’s.

Every once in a while, I’ll eat a sauce that remotely hints at my beautiful Grandma Mary, and I smile. Still nothing has come close. And if Grandma made good spaghetti sauce on any given Sunday, well, in August, when the garden tomatoes were so ripe and sweet you could eat them like apples and the basil was bursting with flavor, it turned her Sunday dinner into a miracle.

Of course, after our “dinner” (Sunday “dinner” was always around noon, a phenomenon my American friends never quite understood), we’d want to go swimming in the ocean. Grandma FREAKED OUT if we even got our toes wet, adhering the cross-cultural belief that swimming within one hour of a meal would lead to surefire death and drowning.

To pass the time while Grandma watched the clock, we’d hunt hermit crabs and shells on the beach under the sun’s rays. “All this Vitamin D is so good for you, kid,” an adult friend called out as we got sunburnt.

Medical science has advanced our thinking so that now we cover up and use SPF 100 (SPF 200?) so we don’t get melanoma; I think we’ve even debunked the whole “wait an hour after eating” thing. But even now, I still have never met anyone who can make pasta like my Grandma.