Walking down the hallway outside

Walking down the hallway outside the office today, I caught a whiff of a familiar smell: that of Uncle Don and Aunt Mary’s basement. Their basement was the very definition of peaceful and quiet and cool when I used to visit as a kid. There was an entire room filled with toys, not the noisy kind of toys, but the quiet kind that you could play with for hours by yourself, the rest of the world forgotten. They had an Intellivision hooked up to the nicest TV I’d ever seen; I played Pitfall, Tron Deadly Disks, B-17 Bomber, and Kool-Aid Man until my thumbs bled. A fish tank bubbled quietly next to the sliding glass doors which looked out upon the lake. A fireplace smelled of fires past and thousands of matchbooks lined the walls and filled giant glass bowls. It was a marvelous place.