Nostalgia... Smelly, smelly nostalgia.

The fraternity and sorority houses on the East side of High Street all have hilled front yards. There are small flights of steps from the uneven, laid-brick sidewalk to each porch and the metal railings, hinged together like plumbing pipes, reminded me yesterday of home. My red house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was where I grew up until I was eight, and when I went back to visit a year later it seemed so much smaller than it ever had when I was living there. The new owners had let my mother's flowerbeds wilt and die. Everything was different.

It had a small stairway with a pipe railing. Or, maybe, it didn't. I remember that railing from somewhere. The way my hand smelled after touching it is what threw me back, even though I didn't touch any of the railings of the frat houses as I walked home. Maybe there was such a railing at Jacobus Park, where my father or sister cast into the pond and snagged my thumb with their fishing hook as I stood behind them. Him. It had to have been him, or my mother, because my sister would have been too young to be casting a fishing rod tipped with a sharp piece of metal. It had a yellow top. I remember that. The piece of plastic where you tied it onto the fishing line was yellow.

I don't remember the important things: what it was like living in Milwaukee, what my house looked like, who was with me that day in the park. I remember smells. After running my hand all the way down the metal railing, my palm would be cold, and smell like an old penny. I often have the compulsion to smell things. It's not something I think about, and I have a way of doing it discreetly. I smell my boyfriend's laundry to see if it's too dirty to wear again. I inhale the drinks I make as a barista, to check whether I put the correct syrup in or to investigate a new flavor combination. And every once and a while, I'll turn a corner and a smell will hit me full in the face, out of nowhere, with no reason or provocation. I have to stay and try to place it, to identify it, but smells are funny that way. You can't always find the name for what it is or who you were with or when you first inhaled. Or why. But there's memory there, always, and I always am transported somewhere to a time I can't name.