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