Decades from now, the smell of hickory smoke might bring back one specific summer. Spend it with people worth remembering.

Memory attaches itself to smells and sounds without asking permission. A particular summer gets filed next to woodsmoke or chlorine or one song, and decades later a stray whiff hands the whole thing back in an instant, including whoever happened to be standing there. The trigger is not yours to choose. The company partly is.

Spend a few of this summer’s evenings with the people you would be glad to be reminded of. Cook outside, get to the water, stay out later than is sensible once. You are quietly deciding what a smell will return to you in forty years.