I’m schlepping into work, horking back another measure of snot. The taste is salty sickness, a gustatory reminder of why I hate winter and the responsibility of adulthood that means I can’t just stay in bed an watch cartoons.

Then it hits me, crisp and unmistakable, the smell. I stop, breathe deep the memory. I know this smell, for it always affects me this way, casting me back into ephemeral corridors of nostalgia. A gentle breeze over cold grass, lifeless in winter’s dark, yet somehow it reaches me, calls out from years gone by.

A thousand places and times stream through my mind, and I try to name them. Rammstein. Keflavik. Goldsboro. Sumter. I want to pin one down as the source, the time when this smell settled in as some defining reference. Usually I go with Iceland, something about that magical little island of the Vikings, North Atlantic winds sweeping over volcanic plains.

But I know better. The smell isn’t a place or a time. For me, it’s childhood, and Heaven help me, I miss it so.