Campfire

Elle grabs her keys off the counter and heads out her front door, locking it behind her. She doesn’t need her car tonight, her friend’s place is only a couple blocks down and besides, the night is crisp and inviting. She picks up her pace as she crosses the street, pulling her jacket a little tighter. Despite the last glimpses of that deep crimson sunset, there’s a chill to the air. The wind picks up and she lifts her chin to it, breathing in the fresh autumn breeze and the smell of a campfire nearby. She smiles, thinking of her childhood, and all the campfires of her summers past. That smell to her means adventure, it means community and nature and warm days and long nights. It means running around a neighborhood trick or treating, or listening from her tent late in the night while the adults are still up laughing around the fire. It’s a feeling of safety and family and of belonging.

 

Fresh Rain on Hot Asphalt

When I was a kid, 9 or 10, my family and I moved to the desert from the Pacific Northwest. I was too young to register such a stark change of climate, but I remember how different all the smells were. In the morning, you had a fleeting freshness that came to warn you of the heat to come. As gone quickly as it came, it led way to the scorching heat of the day, where the lack of moisture in the air made you feel like you had your face too close to the oven when you checked on the bread. The nights were a small relief, temperatures dropping mildly and the sun recharging underneath us. My absolute favorite part, though, were the desert storms. They would come without warning. You’d be under a cloudless bleached blue sky, and storm clouds could converge in a matter of minutes. On your next inhale the clouds would release, spewing forth a downpour of rain onto a heated land. That first rain on the sun-scorched ground has a smell that I’ve come to associate with a feeling of respite, of an ultimate soothing for a land so parched. Of a weather anomaly, something different where things hardly changed.

 

I’m trying to get better in describing how certain scents make me feel. I get immensely moved by my favorite smells. Jasmine bushes on a clear summer morning, the scent of pine near the holidays, cracking open an old, yellowed book, my vast collection of perfumes, all of these smells fill me with immeasurable joy. I figured a key to practicing my descriptive writing would be in trying to take you with me wherever I go when I have my lungs full of the above. It’s sounding weirder the longer I write about it.

 

Ainslee

 

 

 

 

Starting to write feels a lot like picking up a habit you know will be good for you, but finding great excuses to not do it all day long. Like jogging, for example. It’s as simple as they come. Put on your shoes, grab your headphones, and go outside. Except, that’s a horrible example, because my knees swell up after a jog, my shins get mini lightning strikes of pain with each step, and my mind races with thoughts of the time, how long I’ll keep going, if I should stop, etc. And, now that I’m writing, my heart rate is normal and I’m not fighting for breath. So forget I said jogging. Reading! Now that’s an example. I love reading, but these days my ten-second attention span continues to find alternate entertainment. It has almost begun to feel like a chore to chisel out some time, open my book (turn on my kindle, more like), and just focus. But then I get so into the story that I wonder why I didn’t stop perusing reddit or checking my email for the 50th time to start sooner.

Reading, for me, as for millions of others, takes me away. The settings and the characters and the story line all start to become familiar, and, if the author does it right, each time you come back to it feels like you’re coming home. Home to people who don’t care where you came from, or how socially awkward you are, or what mistakes you’ve made in the past and how easily they could be pulled up on Google. Reading is an immensely personal experience, one that differs individual to individual. Isn’t it crazy to think of how many little teen girls and boys (me being one of them a decade and a half ago) read Harry Potter and fantasized over that world, the spells, the magic, the villains, but that for every young avid mind comes an entirely different rendition of that world and those characters. There were millions and millions of different versions of Harry, Ron and Hermoine. All it took was an extremely successful film saga to obliterate the differences and make them into one (namely, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson).

I can’t even remember what I thought Harry looked like in my head. I find it strange that I can’t access that. Maybe it’s because the amount of time Daniel Radcliffe was Harry surmounts the amount of time I was left with my imagination.

The point I’m trying to make is that reading is different for everybody. As is writing. As is speaking, singing, music, debates. Everyone has a different idea of what something should be, and, sometimes, someone comes along with a Daniel Radcliffe of that idea and forever changes the others view point.

This blog for me is more of an outpouring of ideas, emotions and rampant thoughts that have forever floated around in my head and are now realizing an outlet. Now that I’ve paid the yearly subscription though, I can’t remember any of them. I am not writing to anyone. I have no audience, nor can I imagine by some strange slip of fate me ever amassing one. My life is not that interesting. My thoughts sometimes are. But, I’m biased. This blog is purely me, writing to another version of me, while a third version of me reads and critiques it. I hope that third version can take it easy. I’m sensitive.

 

Ainslee

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton