Morning all. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Mine was actually pretty good. I managed to get a lot of chores I was putting off done. Not entirely restful, but it does make me happy they are now finally done. I didn’t actually mean to get them all done but once I started ticking things off the list I just kept going. I suspect it means that next weekend I will be a couch potato but at least this weekend was productive. So lets continue on with the productivity and set the timers for fifteen minutes and see what jumps out of the brain.
I wasn’t sure where this was going until close to the end. Then I got a general story spark in the description. I will be making notes and coming back to this. But yeah, no clue where it was going until the last couple of minutes on the timer.
Monday, June 1st: Spice filled the air.
Spice filled the air. He inhaled deeply and smiled. Cinnamon, Cardamom, nutmeg, allspice, Ginger. He was certain there were spices he couldn’t name but the scents mixed in together into one big scented waft of air.
This was the holidays for him. He didn’t care about the decorations or the songs. For him it was all about the scent. Growing up he had neighbors who believed the lights were the thing. He enjoyed the lights. He even enjoyed the arguments around the lights if he was honest.
There were arguments about placing them and often people having arguments with the lights themselves as they struggled to untangle knots that mysteriously appeared in their year long storage. Then there were arguments over how many lights was too many. In his neighborhood there were also arguments about the decorations. One of his neighbors to the left of the house, Ethan, was British and while he embraced the decorating spirit, his Father Christmas always wore a green robe trimmed with white. He was also tall and slightly slender.
On the right-hand side, Scott, believed that Santa needed to be fat, red cheeked and wearing red and white. If he didn’t look like a nineteen-fifties Cocca-Cola ad, Scott wasn’t interested. He accused Ethan of putting Santa on a diet and Ethan fought back with comments of commercialism over history.
The arguments raged all season every year with neither giving an inch. The only time they stopped was when the two neighbors across the street put their lights up. Both believed in massive displays with timers and music. Each year they both chose the same time to start and the sound and light storm it produced was deafening. After a few days they coordinated things and timed their sequences so one ended there was a pause and the next began. Then there was a short pause and the first started up.
His house was modest in comparison. The roof line had a string of blue lights wrapped around it, a holly wreath on the door and electric candles in the windows. They were festive but clearly had no stake in the ‘winning Christmas’ game everyone else played. They were neutral ground.
It was why they hosted the neighborhood Christmas party. His mother loved to bake and she went all out. He supposed it was why he associated the holidays with scent more than anything else. He sighed, opened his eyes and pressed the button to end the program. The waft of air blowing the scent turned off.
He was once again standing in the compact quarters that everyone had. The walls were molded metal and then covered with something softer to make it more homey. The something softer he thought was some sort of polymer. He knew it came in one color and didn’t take dyes. He was certain that there was a color name for it but to him it looked like oatmeal. A world covered with Oatmeal, broken up only by electric panels and conduits. Even the bed was molded and often looked like the wall had some sort of growth.
Ten til Midnight 