You know how smells often trigger the most vivid memories? It’s for this reason I love getting packages from Grammy, hand-crocheted blankets and stuffed animals with her familiar and comforting scent still lingering: a combination of the face cream she’s used for decades and unconditional love. It brings to mind afternoons spent at her kitchen table working on elaborate crafts, rhinestone studded miniature hot air balloons and soda bottle volcanoes. Together we were always in motion, making, creating.

The smell though, the defining smell of my childhood, was harsher, harder to avoid. Until I was twelve, I lived with my siblings and parents in a small house on a creek in New Jersey. Grammy lived across the street along with my aunt and uncle, and my cousins lived a few houses down. To the adults, our block was an ugly dead end populated by small houses built too close for comfort, surrounded by tick-infested weeds prone to catching fire. To us kids, it was paradise.

There was endless opportunity for adventure, luring tiny crabs out from their hidey-holes in the creek bed, making up origin stories for the rusty Stop-N-Shop cart lodged in the mud, creating secret hang-out spots in the weeds, the tall fronds giving us blessed cover from parent’s prying eyes. There was also a smell, a pungent aroma that would go in your nose and up your throat until you could taste it on your tongue. It was mostly dormant in the winter and peaked in the summer, when we would sometimes wake up to massive fish kills with unconfirmed ties to the abandoned flavor and fragrance factory further down the creek. As kids we didn’t know what it was, we just knew what it meant: freedom.

I remember a lot because I wrote a lot down. But those memories, immortalized on the page through my fifteen year old eyes, have an edge to them, an unavoidable byproduct of perspective. Something different happens when I go back there and breathe it in, in all its occasionally unbearable glory. Something pure. A sign of home. The smell of water.