The Shifting Green in anticlimatic

I was gliding along on my bicycle today, down by the waterfront, when I caught a whiff of some Italian cooking. Like meatballs or something. It was very familiar, and comforting somehow…like the way some of my fancier friend’s kitchens would smell when I was visiting them as a kid.

I glanced towards the smell at your average overgrown driveway, thickly protected with cedar hedges, and a long concrete path snaking through this deliberate greenery to a wooden front door, almost hiding underneath its round arch. It looked almost like a secret path. Like a secret path to someone’s entire cozy world… and then I had flown past it, and was left gliding down the street again, suddenly alone with my thoughts as though I hadn’t been alone with my thoughts the entire time.

An ambient after-track played in my mind’s ear. Something about overgrown paths and wooden doors that are round at the top trigger very old memories of the smell of ferns and the 80s, and I can always hear some kind of distant saxophone muted by fog playing far off, like through a window from someone’s kitchen.

There is something common in the specificity of certain things- like driveways and doorways- to the effect that you can see one driveway/doorway combo, and then see 1000 others before you see another one that is close to identical…yet 1000 doorways can be passed in relatively short order, comparatively speaking- since there are just so many in the world- that even down to specific details, maybe not all but enough to hold some meaning, you will encounter the same doorway. The same driveway.

Again, and again.

Across decades. Across generations of owners, in your own lifetime.

In this way there is something....meaningful there. Something frightening. Like a stitch in the wheel of time- an axis point connecting all kinds of places on the earth through time and space.