prompt: smell of something you love

possibly my favorite place in the world is my cabin in Minnesota. i love the smell too, it smells of my childhood years spent up north. . now a little bit about the cabin... my grandma and great uncle bought the property back when their kids were  starting to form their own families. it was meant to be a shared property for the benefit of all. There are three cabins. the one that my side of the family mostly keeps to lies on the cliff of a steep ravine. surrounding are countless trees with trunks as thin as a pencil and long as a telephone poll. together, they form a sort of light canopy around the house. the house, a square a minimalist building has dark wooden beams seen supporting the ceiling window above where if you look up you can see pine trees that shed their needles right on top of the window. not much light gets through because of the blockage of browning needles and securely smuggled dirt. i would guess the only cleaning that window gets is from the rain. there are few lamps because most of the walls are windows that give you a spacious look at the gurgling revenue terrain. imagine the look of one of those new York skylines above the city. thats what the cabin looks like. and don't think that ravine isn't steep because i would be terrified to tumble down. BUT THE SMELL. i can smell the old washed sheets and the banana boat sunscreen being slathered onto the skin of tinier bodies years ago. the aged colored wood and the dust wafting off puzzles that hadn't been used since we were all too young to have iPhones and there wasn't anything else to do after swimming. maybe the sweet aroma of old ice cream cake being eaten in the kitchen, left over form uncle jeffs birthday. The road, the leaves, the tennis courts and obtrusively man made smell of new tennis balls. i can hear the pop of the metal lid coming off too. the river smells of the shrubbery that grows next to bodies of water, its tangled mess dropping seeds on dogs, our loving passengers of natures hitchhikers. gooey, sticky mud with green frogs in it meets the lapping water. if you step in it your toes sink, if you try to walk through the water you are more than likely to step on a decaying branch under water. the anticipation is killer let me tell you. but the river makes me see how native americans were so reverent of the nature they were entrusted to keep. it is beautiful, and even the gooey mud gives way to soft sand. it total, it smells of sweetness and stickiness and dark rich wood. it is an aroma to describe the lighter parts of childhood and where my family bickers and loves and comes together in the romanticized view of an idealist Childs heart.