Chocolate Factory

Quite often, I walk between home and the college along Main street. The first time I did this, I was on the phone talking with my mother. It was hot (natch), and humid, and I was walking slowly through building shadows in a futile attempt to not completely soak my dress in sweat. In the midst of my mother's volubility, the smell of tootsie rolls yanked me into a confused olfactory hallucination--a vivid memory of the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, from the original movie.

I was bemused, when I refocused on the real world, to see only a group of men in shirtsleeves, smoking on the steps of a brick building. Clearly not the oompah loompahs. Nonetheless, as I walk by this building nearly every day, I am briefly enveloped in gently chocolate, sometimes chocolate mint, clouds.

At night, the building is equally entrancing--its old factory windows softly looming in the night. Generally, I phoned home or my mother on my walks, and it was with a twinge of regret that I walked past this building always in the middle of a conversation, rarely in the midst of a reverie.