I’m riding my bike in the back streets of Melbourne. It’s a summer day, hot wind whistling past my ears. My skin prickles as the air temperature mirrors my own, 37 degrees, a symbiosis relieved only by leg powered wind. As I ride past, I’m assailed by the smells coming from open windows and doors left ajar to catch an elusive breeze. I’m immediately overwhelmed by emotion as the scents release deep memories.

Each up-peddle pulls a recollection, each down-peddle pushing it back only to be replaced by another and another as I race along the road. It feels like dipping into a well of forgetfulness with a bucket of remembering. Rapid heaves pull up anger, sorrow, joy, shame, resentment. Each one catching in the wheel spokes and sent flying into the shimmering heat of the suburban street. Fury, naivety, innocence, crushed under the tyres, squelching on the melting asphalt. My bike wheels, a roulette of spinning memories.

Here is the yeasty smell of baking bread transporting me to years of feeding a capricious sour dough starter given to me by someone wearing a Janus-face I didn’t recognise. Somedays the bread would rise triumphantly golden and on others, it would sink into a gluey mass. I see my children’s mouths crunching on hard crusts, melted butter glistening on small lips. Gone.

Now, the acrid odour of drying laundry and that one piece of clothing, a T-shirt? Underwear? That one piece that refuses to be cleaned despite the sloshing and spinning of a valiant washing machine. A defiant reminder that dirty laundry will always be aired. I see a row of infant singlets hanging on the line, pristine white glistening in the sunshine. School uniforms flapping in the breeze give way to black T-shirts emblazoned with band names and Manga characters. A work shirt with its starched collar moves stiffly in the wind. Gone.

Now, the unmistakable smell of dampness from a concrete cellar. Here are the youthful days spent in my migrant parent’s cantina, dug out under their house. Here is where the hanging salami, the bottled passata and the preserved vegetables hold court in their regal splendour. Fiery reds, vinegared yellows, mottled browns. I play “shop” here, moving the jars, exchanging buttons as coins with imaginary customers. Above me, my father is stomping between bedroom and hallway, his booming voice proclaiming his right as il patrone, and reminding us that in this house, commando io. My mother’s silence. Gone.

The cantina is modelled on my father’s house in his village of Roccamontepiano. No, not exactly in the village, but two kilometres from the town centre where La Chiesa di San Rocco stands. It’s an ungainly modern church reconstructed from the 17th century original, destroyed by a landslide, common in this aquifer rich landscape. I’ve always wondered how a squat, rectangular structure could evoke such devotion and acquiescence from its parishioners. San Rocco, the protector against epidemics, and especially the plague, is revered for granting wishes to the ill and ill at heart. Here, there are no arches, no spires, no patinaed coverings or marbled swirls. Only a statue of an aging man revealing a sore on his left thigh paraded silently from the church into a setting sun every 16th day in August.

Here, outside the village, is a cluster of stone houses facing a communal fontana. The water trough fills day and night with cascading water from the ice-capped mountains of La Maiella, a dominating massif on the Abruzzo horizon. I’m here as a child on a visit, in a whirlwind of prickling blackberries growing by the side of the road and pecking chickens stirring up dust in a wired enclosure. Gone.

I’m here as an adult in la cantina watching my Zio, my father’s brother, an air rifle poised to kill the pesky rat that’s been nibbling at the drying figs and hanging garlic. My Zio perched on a small stool, handmade from la ginestra, a local plant he’s harvested and transformed into a complex weave. He sits sentry to the vats of pressed grapes, growling and bubbling ominously in their steel containers. There is my Zia, standing beside the stone sink. An old copper pot poised under the tap ready to soak the desiccated bread destined to feed the local cats milling at la cantina door. When the fishmonger arrives with his truck and fish wares on Thursday, she will buy the fish heads and add them to the pot.

‘Quest’ e la mamma.’ My Zia explains pointing to a thin cat with grey and white markings. The other cats carry their mother’s colouring mingled with the black and ginger of several suitors. The many cats are fed in small groups. Some of the food bowls are placed high on top of la pentolone just outside la cantina door. It’s a hefty iron cauldron with a lid my Zio has welded together to boil the passata bottles for their sterilising bagnomaria.

‘Abbiamo fatto 220 bottigli la settimano scorso, primo di quello abbiamo produtto 275 bottigli di pomodorri.’ My Zia tells me they have produced almost 500 bottles of pressed tomatoes from their garden that they will share with family and neighbours. Gone.

The sprinklers are on as I cycle past a large oval. Here is the scent of freshly mowed grass. The smell normally associated with nostalgia is actually a distress signal from damaged plant cells. For me the smell is of celery. My mother, carefully cutting celery in the kitchen, adding it to a pot of water along with a whole “boiling” chicken, tomato pieces, some carrots and a halved onion to make the Sunday brodo. I can smell the brewing soup from outside where I’m riding my new two-wheeler bike.

“Giddy up. Good boy. Whoa.” I mimic the Western movies watched on our black and white television. I am free, like the cowboys sitting on their muscular twitching steeds staring whimsically into distant mountain ranges. I am free to ride to the end of the five houses in our street and back. The border of safety within eyesight of my parents’ double story brick veneer house. I look back from the end of the street. The house watches me through its venetian blind eyes; its white balustrade teeth set in a firm grimace. The end of the street stretched the cord to its limit. Pulling me back now, again and again and again, as I pedal through the back streets of Melbourne on a summer day.