🌟 New to Hearthlight? You can start your journey here or catch up on the last week’s stories below, or jump straight to Day 17. It’s a short week this week and next in Aotearoa New Zealand, so we’re finishing our week of Hearthlight today (Thursday) and will pick it back up next week (on Tuesday).
Today’s prompt: “You breathe in a scent of something in the air. What does it remind you of, and how does it make you feel?”
Today’s music: Autumn Leaves by Lofi Fruits Music. 🎧 Listen on SoundCloud.
The Sweet Scent
Some things should be illegal. The obvious ones we’ve already worked out—stealing is bad, and murder is worse. Those are well understood, and society’s wheel turns around this central cog of agreed laws and order.
But others? We’re not quite there yet. Such as: the smell of baking cookies. This is a fine smell in your own home, but when it’s 11:30am and your stomach is on high alert for lunch options? Well, people shouldn’t be allowed to have an oven venting into the street.
This is the conundrum I faced as I toured Hearthlight: the elusive scent of baking cookies on the wind. The source eluded me; it wasn’t Trudy branching out from her lane of S-tier gelato. It wasn’t the pub, and Mike’s Meats was a long stone’s throw from a bakery. It seemed likely it was just a citizen, enjoying their powers of home baking, pushing back the tide of ennui with a little chocolate-chip love.
My steps slowed. There was something about that smell that tickled the back of my mind. I felt like I should remember it; there should be a marker in my mind. Perhaps my mother’s baking? The idea felt like it fit, but the exact memory wouldn’t come. I wanted to be taken back there. I needed to remember the time before, when life was easier. A child’s view of the world is structured quite differently to us Bigs; there is no rent to pay, and no boss yelling at you. Just swings, or raked leaf mounds to dive into. Bikes ridden, your feet moving the pedals faster and faster to get some airflow on those long, slow summer days.
I knew this. But I couldn’t go back. The cookie smell wouldn’t take me, and trying to think my way there wasn’t working either. Maybe it was the hamlet reminding me that childhood has its place, but we can only live it once. Maybe Hearthlight had nothing to do with it, and it was just my stress-addled mind finally blowing a fuse after one too many meetings about TPS reports.
It made me a little sad. It felt like something about my childhood was gone, lost to me for all time. What would the world be like if we could all remember our inner child, welcome them into our lives, and let them out to dive into a pile of fresh-raked leaves again?
I stopped walking, hands stuffed into my pockets. Was this today’s lesson—that you can never go home again? I’m not sure I needed it; I’d felt it every day before I got here.
No. I refused to believe it. If my inner child was dead, I might as well give up, but I figured him in more of a sulk than a quitting mood. I straightened. There was something I could do today: buy a rake. There were plenty of leaves I could gather into a pile.
Roll result? A cookie-scented heartbreak, one inner child on strike, and a leaf pile waiting to be made.
XP gained: +1 reluctant nostalgia, +1 sensory longing, and a shiny new rake for emotional landscaping.
🌰 Some memories arrive on the breeze, others in your inbox.
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