…in a place that perhaps you’ve dreamed in your teens.
I caught a whiff of something the other day half way through a random bedroom in this cottage I was working in. Best I can describe is a kind of clean nostalgic linen with hints of vinyl, succulent plants, ferns, and and soft yellow fluorescents.
It transported me back somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. Nowhere to land. And just as quickly as I sniffed it, it was gone. Mostly forgot the scent in the following hours, but something about that pull backwards camped out in the back of my mind like a song in one’s head.
It camped quietly, until I was rolling back into town the back way, going down through this little valley up between the high school and the downtown through the residentials, which I had recently learned was a deep creek bed that was slowly built up by residents over hundreds of years into an eventual land bridge with a long culvert below to carry the creek.
The same creek, I also learned, that feeds the famous waterfall down at the limestone cliffs by the water’s edge on the town’s eastern border along the lake. As I passed over the land bridge I glanced down into the sunken green valley on either side that hid the creek, and the memory of that pull backwards popped up in me, and I perceived-
Early settlers with their lantern window lit cottages tucked under the tall pre-logged growth. Sparse, and organic. Little homes like mushrooms growing in the forest, with the creek bed to draw them down.
It reminded me of how I saw the world when I was a toddler. Just a soft, lazy creek weaving through beautiful grasses and groves. Occasionally the creek would pass a water wheel mill and a peasant would come walking out with a bucket on a stick over his shoulder and a smile with a wave.
There is really just something magical about discovery. Always we are discovering new things, but there is nothing quite like that initial avalanche when our senses and prefrontal cortex all come online. Things HAVE to be made simple at that stage, I think. There aren’t yet building blocks for anything complex. And so everything is simple, and in hindsight- almost overwhelmingly beautiful.
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