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[TRANSCRIPT]
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You know how sometimes, your nose will catch a particular smell, sometimes out of nowhere, and you’ll just be thrown back in time? And there’ll be nothing else about where you are or what you’re doing that should be reminding you of when you were a kid, but that one smell is just so powerful, all of your other senses briefly take a backseat while you go on a trip you didn’t sign up for.
You’ll inhale that scent and suddenly you’re nine years old again, running out into the fields that surround your house even though you’re supposed to be helping your mom fold the laundry. Instead you go outside and you make more laundry, the hem of your skirt dusted in dirt, grass stains on the back of your pressed linen shirt. You smell that smell and it’s Sunday afternoon and you haven’t taken off your church clothes when you go sprinting off into the wilderness, even though that stiff collar makes you feel like you’re choking, because you don’t have any clothes that don’t suffocate you slowly, or at least not any your mother will let you wear. So feeling the ground underneath feet and the air rushing through your lungs as you run, run, run, that’s really…that’s pretty much the only way you know how to feel free. 
And you know you’ll have to go back in time for dinner. That your mother will complain about the state of your knees and the tangle of your hair and lament to your father about how she’s ever going to turn you into a respectable lady when you insist on going around the way that you do. And your father will laugh and say that you’re still a child, that you’ll grow out of it, become serious and proper and he winks at you like he knows that that’s not true. But you’ll agree with his words all the same, because there’s that part of you deep down that wants the tension in your mother’s shoulders just disappear. 
But that smell—that sunshine and grass and free and wild smell—will still be in your nose, forever, stronger even then the hot dinner your mother puts in front of you. 
And twenty-five years later you’ll wish you’d listened more, or that you’d really been in that kitchen instead of having your head in the clouds, because then maybe you would’ve appreciated the time you had with her, as frustrating as it could be. A whole quarter century later, you’ll be driving down an empty highway at the end of the world with the windows rolled down, in a state you’ve never really been in before, on a road you’ve never driven, and you’ll realize that you are finally truly free. Free in a way you never thought you could be—free from the starched collars and the rent bills and the locked doors. Free to roam as far as you’d ever want to, except this time, you know there’s no one waiting to put a hot plate of food in front of you. You have no way of ever going home again. 
Tennessee in the morning smells like that. 
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