A Whiff of Yesterday

You know that feeling of the sun warming your shoulders and making you smile?

Sometimes that happens and then in the next moment you catch a fleeting whiff of rain, a smell you remember from childhood when you stared out your window wishing you were still outside playing but for the rushes of water falling from the sky, ruining your hopscotch board, making your Keds squish and your toes damp and cold to the core.

It can happen quickly like that, or it can happen as each frame in a film, one second at a time, each day laid out in your memory, step by step, your life like a time-lapse which can even seem like someone else's story in parts. And sometimes still, you may realize that you have left things forgotten until they come back unbidden and in a rush.

That's what a whiff of rain did for me yesterday. It was fleeting and left me quicky, but what stayed behind was the memory of my small self peering through the white sheers of my childhood bedroom windows, watching the rain and lamenting missed time in the shoulder-warming sun. I had been smiling just moments before; things were always getting ruined like that in those days, I took them so seriously.