Ride your bike down a certain street on a warm night.
It's the smell. The late evening early late night smell of domestic activity and the air will make your brain pop in a million places. Pop like vertebrae when you sit up straight.
Neurology specialists attest the sense of smell to be the closest to our memory. Not sure of the science of the matter I find the connection more of a concept than a science. Sights, feelings, and touch take over our lives and memory in an overwhelming abundance; imagine filing cabinets in some FBI basement chock full of photos and reports. Smell and taste preserved from this motley, remain exclusive -- time capsules being not the most groundbreaking of memories preserved in smell but little pockets of insight making a smell map chronicling the most primal of memory (ever take a bite of baby food?)
Sometimes I put sunscreen on in the winter.
Coast the long way home from Pilot Butte after a sunset and take your time to get to Franklin. Midnight black road of 15th where there are no street lights, right at Bear Creek, forget where you are and swerve into neighborhoods. Watch cats hypnotize themselves watching moths flurry in the street lamp and take one long inhale. Pass the swimming pool for the waft of chlorine surfacing the child who first choked at the first jump into the "deep" end.
Popcorn, laundry, lingering barb-b-ques, sprinklers crisping the air with a hiss of water: a flood of experiences rush in, as if flipping through a photo album where the images are in no specific order.
Cigarettes make me think of Kevin.
Pipe tobacco makes me think of Tonia.
The smells hang in cloud pockets, waft in invisible orbs.
Carry your head through them and never exhale, open your mouth to taste the night on the back of your tongue.
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