Summer dusk

Occasionally a certain sound or smell or quality of light can transport me right back to my childhood in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.

The look of dusk after the sun has set, the sky still light enough to see with; a turtledove cooing; conversation on a porch in the distance; the green smell of a watered lawn. Put these together and I'm a little girl again lying in my bed listening through the window to the laughter of the grownups and the clink of iced tea glasses on the porch below.

I can almost taste the feeling. It's a sweet and painful pang of nostalgia and primal memory.

But now I'm the adult with the icy drink, sitting on the porch, enjoying the early summer green all around me in the oncoming dusk.