tobacco scented childhood

I think my fascination with cigarettes isn't the nicotine high, the quick dopamine hit, the cloud weaving its way into my lungs and brain, creating a fleeting yet intoxicating feeling. My fascination with cigarettes is far more rooted in nostalgia. The musky smell of tobacco on my fingers, the curve of my lips when I inhale, the posture I pose in is all reminiscent of the people closest to me -- in my childhood -- some of those who are no longer in the picture.

My mother ten or fifteen years younger, all youth, all suave, low rise jeans and a fringe haircut dyed burnt orange red. Her big white teeth always visible. She was the "IT" girl, the cool girl, the person I always wanted to grow into. Her smacking the pack -- one, two, three times -- against her thin, bitten down nailed fingers. Her lean shape ready to inhale.

Or my uncles, all seated around a wood table, darts dangling out of their mouths. Their midnight hair short -- all save Lee's. Their tanned fingers rolling their next meal. Big smiles, big Ramsey smiles, chuckles and soft southern drawls.

Randy -- a cigarette dangling dangerously haphazard from his golden stubbled mouth, his bright blue eyes crinkled as he smiled down at me, a wayward hand running through his thick golden sun red hair. Or perched neatly behind his year, his dark green Packers hat positioned backward, flattening his hair into a neat line, as the sweat traveled perilously down his A-line nose, the same grin exhales the smoke and talks about the next roof he will be hopping to.

The smell of tobacco smells like home.

It smells like being eight years old convincing the neighbor kids to try one, just one, like shadowing our parents at the Tobacco Barn with our Spiderman candy cigarettes dangling lazily from our mouths, hands on our hips, exhaling. Talking about our divorce or not being able to make the rent payment next month, oh lord have mercy, what will we do?

It tastes like McDonalds on the beach, the hot sand burning my feet, a pain I miss terribly now or grass stains on my knees from falling, always tripping. It smells like cold Yahoo's or crisp Pepsi bottles, swinging so high and leaning so far back, I was convinced I had sprouted wings and was flying.

It feels like childhood wonder and nostalgia all at the same time. All at once - a beautiful terrible haunting yet comforting mess in my chest.

Who could blame me for craving it?

Wanting two more minuets of a simpler time back.

Who could blame me?

***

authors note:

The smell of cigarettes has been the scent of my childhood since, well, childhood. It's a smell that most might find offensive but to me calls to me like a long lost memory. Of summer nights, and wicked childhood adventures. Of people and places I haven't seen nor thought of in years. When I smell that slightly burning smell, a pain aches' in my chest. For a simpler time, for a younger time. Sometimes for the people who are no longer here, for the people we were all those years ago.

I cave sometimes, and I smoke one -- most of the time the feeling of nostalgia is so sharp I can't even finish it, but I dust it off and put it out on the concrete just like my uncles, my mother, Randy, and everyone else who aided in my tabacco filled childhood.