Shahdoud

There was a house at the edge of the orchard where the air was always warm with honey and vanilla, where benzoin smoked gently from a brass dish and the tonka beans were kept in a drawer that had not been emptied in three generations.

Children who grew up there spent their lives trying to return. Not to the house itself, which fell to ruin, but to the feeling of it, the particular sweetness that was never too much, the warmth that meant safety and dusk and someone waiting for you.

This is the strangeness of the sweetest things: they are made of memory more than sugar. The scent lingers in a room long after the wearer has left it, the way the smell of that house lingered in the children who became adults and could never quite explain, to anyone, what it was they were always trying to find their way back to.