Dutch Dreams

The smell is sweet. You can sense it even with swollen sinuses and the stuffed nose that inevitably comes every winter. Breathing it into your mouth it somehow fills your throat. You can smell it, or your mind remembers the smell - so rare that it cannot be summon from pure memory only when it is here, assaulting the mind into thinking about the delicious components. Sweet like thin, watery icing. Thick like bread, yeast and heat and toasting flour to brown and crispy. Cooking sugar. I don't even like to have my ice cream in a cone, let alone waste taste, coins, and calories on the upgrade. But there is nothing - nothing - like the smell of the ice cream shop around the corner cooking waffle cones, except maybe that smell coasting towards you through a closed door, across a snow covered parking lot, made stronger by the sharp crisp air of winter.