Walking through Walmart tonight, I passed by an employee who smelled like cigarette smoke and tobacco, and for a moment, I was small and back in Kansas, inching up the thinly-slabbed concrete sections of the walk from the parking port behind the house in the alley towards the tall white home. The air is sweaty and you smell sulfur and hayweed and your skin is quickly glossy glazed and it’s heavy in your nose and chest and you look toward the screened-in square porch at the back of the house excited, with expectation, where they would soon be- there they are, they heard our car door, or he came back to look for us- there they were, Grandad standing there with Grandmother behind him, opening the screen door, tall, his short hair grayish white over his horn-rimmed spectacles, in a short-sleeved white button down and some slacks, Grandma shorter and thicker behind him, working for breath, eyes big looking out to us, in a moment breaking into smile. “Hello, Scotty!” he’d extol in his baritone voice. “Hello, Kristi! Hello, Bruce!” We’d walk past the completely cracked slab in the middle of the yard as they came out of porch to meet us, and we’d always note the green-gray cistern pump was still there, near the door, off to the side, a giant metal obelisk shaped like a headstone with a crankable arm on it. The grass was kinda tall and scraggy and the bugs rattled and the birds argued and Grandpa would have a paper in his hand, and he would bend down to hug us and we would smell the distinct rich smell of tobacco all over him, and then Grandma’s jolly, once enchanting face would fill with a smile and her tired eyes would light up and she would reach over to kiss us, breath like Spearmint gum with tobacco behind it, and we were happy to see them and to feel the wet heat and to smell the tobacco smell and to see the cracked white paint on the wood siding enclosing the porch and covering the modest gigantic two-story home. It was giant to us back then and was our home away from home far away in the giant mega-field of Kansas, that house with a real stair case and push-button light switches and fancy wall furnace units we shouldn’t touch and a clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom, and hidden spaces and hiding places, and the sound of cars clackety-clacketing by outside on the brick road in front of it.

We experienced that moment a few times.

I loved the smell of that tobacco.