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i had to stop for a minute on my walk to work this morning, as a truck backed into a loading bay, and the smell of gasoline and exhaust fumes wafted over and transported me like a wormhole back in time about 29 years. 

i'm in my gram's garage on Hershey Road, with its oil-stained cement floor and crudely-built wooden shelves filled with my uncles' various junk—tools, motorcycle helmets, old games, baseball gloves, Frisbees, etc.

the late-afternoon sun is filtering through lush green leaves on the aging oak trees that line the yards and bow over the street, making the block feel like a safe, secret place, separate from the real world.

my cousin brad and i grab my uncle matt's skateboard and trek up the sidewalk—it feels like a serious hill to our little legs, though it's actually an extremely subtle incline. we reach the corner of Hershey and Lenox and arrange ourselves on the skateboard, seated. (it's nearly impossible now to imagine how we both fit on a two-foot skateboard, even as gangly pipsqueaks.) one of us sits in the front, cross-legged, the other kneels behind, sneakered toes dangling off the back of the board.

then one-two-three and we're off, rumbling down the old, cracked sidewalk, in the cool clean shade of the trees. we make it almost to Gram's driveway, veer into the grass and tumble off the skateboard, shrieking.

then we do it again. and again. and again.

i love how smells take me back, so vividly, to exact moments in time. i have similar visceral reactions when i smell freshly-cut lumber (i think of the summers when my dad would rearrange his brick patio and the big piles of sand he'd have handy in the driveway and how i played gleefully in those piles with my Matchbox cars) and french fries on cold nights (i think of Gram treating me to Happy Meals on the weekends i'd stay with her when i was little) and a certain shampoo i've been using lately at the gym (which takes me back two years to my vagabond summer when i crashed on the couches of friends and relatives and lugged around travel-size everything in my duffel).

anyway, it was nice this morning, for five minutes, to relive those times with my cousin, to remember exactly how thrilled i always was to take those skateboard rides, to be in such a magical place as my Gram's neighborhood—a little memory lane escapism on a nothing-special winter weekday morning.

mbm