Wood smoke, bacon, cold
sweet, sweet smells, full of wonder
memory overload

For her birthday, I treated my wife and myself to a night in a cabin in the mountains of North Georgia.

Breakfast was included and served over at the main lodge dining room.

We woke up to a very cold morning in foothills of the Blue Ridge.

Cold that you could smell.

Cold that made understand why it is referred to with the definite article, THE.

The Cold.

THE COLD.

Mr. Cold.

What does cold smell like?

To me, is clear and cold, with a smell much like ice cold water on a hot day.

My nose twitches and maybe contracts.

Or maybe it is the assault on my airways by what seems like pure oxygen at below freezing temperatures.

Maybe I cannot describe the smell of cold, but I know when I smell it.

I could smell the cold as we walked to breakfast.

We opened the door to the dining room and walked in.

Walked in to be embraced by warmth.

Embraced.

There is no better word for how this felt.

Embraced by the warmth and the smells of wood smoke tinged with bacon.

There have be people who have never had the pure, unadulterated pleasure of smelling wood smoke and bacon when coming in from THE cold.

There have to be people who don’t have this memory and I feel sorry for them.

In that moment, going through the door, all other thoughts were wiped from my brain.

My mental computer rebooted.

To quote the W.P. Kineslla in Shoeless Joe comes to Iowa;

… and it will be as if they have … dipped themselves in magic waters.

The memories will be so thick, the outfielders will have to brush them away from their faces.

In the movie Field of Dreams, the line is said ever so differently but oh so differently as “and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.“

Switching places between the outfielders and the people who came.

Someday I will have to find out who made the change.

But I digress.

Walking into that breakfast room.

The smoky smells of a wood fire and bacon stirred memories that filled the room with visible memory moths around candles.

I was 5 years old.

I was 10.

12, 16, 23.

Almost 60.

Memories on memories.

I had to brush them away from my face to grab a plate.

Don’t get me wrong.

Memories.

Memories so thick you have to brush them away are great to have.

Wonderful.

To have the memories AND the reality of a cold morning.

A room warmed by a smokey wood fire in an iron stove.

And plate heaped with bacon, eggs, sausage, biscuits and white pepper gravy.

Endless cups of hot coffee.

Shove those memories to one side as a new memory is ladled like gravy over everything.

Memories made new.

bang, bang, bang-bang-bang
middle of the night gunshots
get out of Dodge time

It was the night before any other day and all through the house.

Not a creature was stirring.

Not even me, which for an old guy, sleeping through the night, is pretty good.

Then the sound of gunshots, two then three in a row from outside but close by woke up everybody around 3AM.

Lauren, my oldest daughter, who is fearless ran outside to see what was going on.

Fearless but thoughtful, she stuck a meat cleaver in the pocket of her robe just in case.

If you can imagine a young lady, 8 months pregnant, in a flowing robe and slippers carrying a meat cleaver, outside at 3AM, you get the picture.

Her report was that the nieghbors heard someone banging on their back door, then the gunshots and the sound of a car driving away.

She added that the cops were on the way.

Understand that this is the quietest of quiet nieghborhoods.

Filled with families with children and dogs and mini vans.

An incredible diverse community of White, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, and Euro families.

My wife and I walk daily no matter how cold it gets and I am talking below 40 even 35 degrees sometimes.

We felt safe.

Not this morning.

I want to feel safe and I want my wife to feel safe and I want my family to feel safe.

What am I to do?

Buy a gun myself?

For those of you who know me, say out loud, “Mike with a gun in his hands.”

Admit it.

You laughed.

You laughed out loud.

Things … happen to me.

In the book, The Haunted Bookshop, Mrs. Mifflin says about 19 year old girls, “The don’t react, they explode!”

Things around me, well, they explode.

Believe me, if I had a gun in my hands, the only place anyone should be is behind me, and even then I am not so sure.

Its a long way between feeling safer and me with a gun.

I am always trying to find the humor.

But this wasn’t funny.

Is the answer when a car pulls up at house, everyone inside is stationed at a window with wooden shutters pierced by loopholes and a half dozen rifles are trained on the car.

The person in the car can hear the clicks of rifle hammers being pulled back.

Wait, that’s from the Daniel Boone show.

Last night was not TV.

It was real.

I don’t know.

Time to get out of Dodge I guess.