I'm sitting out on my porch steps having a cup of tea. Leaves are scratching their way down the street as Saturday traffic passes. It's cool out, so I'm wearing a hoodie and these lounge pants that I bought at the supermarket. To this day, I think it's funny that you can walk into a supermarket and buy pants. "Eggplants, butter...oh, pants!" It's weird. Convenient, but weird. They're comfortable and don't look awful, surprisingly.
The temperature is so cool that someone has a fire going somewhere. I can smell it on the breeze. It's a good woodsmoke smell - a cozy fire with seasoned logs. Many times, when someone has an intentional fire around here, it smells like they're immolating IKEA furniture. There will be a smell of a burning wood-like substance with an acrid chemical note. I never understand how people can have that smell near them, much less release it into the atmosphere. It's as cozy as a burning power transformer.
But the *good* burning wood smell, that's just fine. When I smell it in October, it puts me in mind of two things:
1. When I was very young, I was playing in the field down the street one late October day. My friends and I were playing football, or maybe we were just throwing each other physically around the field, same thing really, and it was getting on toward six o'clock and it was beginning to get dark and I smelled the smoke from someone's chimney and it was like the click of a camera shutter. It completed the picture of that point in time, so whenever I smell good woodsmoke, I'm immediately transported to that moment. I can see the fading Autumn light and darkness falling on the houses across the street from the field. I can feel the chill in the air, very similar to today's chill. It's such a sensation of transport that it's almost literally like time travel.
2. This incredible makeout session that I had in middle school on a hayride sponsored by a local community center. They put a bunch of hormonally-explosive teens in a wagon filled with hay on some farm somewhere in late October on a dark night and let them rip. It was like a government breeding program, not that I was complaining then or now.
I forget how I partnered up with Rhonda, my paramour for the evening. One or the other of us probably leaned into the other and started kissing. However it happened, it was brutal, yet effective. Tossing around in the hay for what seemed like days, locking lips with the lovely, raven-haired Rhonda while the wagon swayed gently and woodsmoke, the good kind, perfumed the air. As government breeding programs went, it was quite nice and I'd sign on again if presented with the opportunity.
Rhonda and I only had that one night, although she was on the fringes of my friend group and eventually married one of those friends. It was kind of odd that she did, at least to me, because the guy she married, Jerry, was dating one of her friends, Vicky, at the time, and Jerry and Vicky were on the hayride as well, presumably getting up to heavy kissing too. I say presumably because I didn't look as I had my own adolescence to attend to.
And parents signed permission slips so we could go on the hayride. If they only knew. They probably did.
Time for more tea and more memories to drift by on the woodsmoke.
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