The smell of your family’s kitchen is a memory being saved right now. Breathe it in.

Smell goes somewhere older than thinking. A room you have not stood in for years can come back whole from one hit of garlic in a pan, and you are building that library right now without meaning to. Nothing is being collected on purpose. You are just waiting for dinner.

Next time something is cooking, stop in the doorway for a few seconds before you do anything else. Do not photograph it. Let it be the kind of thing you keep by accident, which is the only way this particular kind of thing gets kept.