The Smell of Autumn & Winter

When I was wee and skipping through the streets of Yesan, South Korea, when the leaves were turning color and the cool breeze would begin to pick up, the streets were filled with the smell of autumn, and winter for that matter. The smell of delicious warm food.

Vendors would sell hot buns filled with meat and vegetables, charcoal-grilled flattened pieces of dried cuttlefish, and last but not least, roasted chestnuts. The smell of roasting chestnuts... so warm, nutty, and just downright comfy. That memory has only been recently relived (I haven't eaten roasted chestnuts since I was a small little thing) when I passed by a vendor in Little Tokyo and caught a whiff of that familiar but distant aroma.

I walked over with my eyes fixed on these little gems, much smaller than most chestnuts I had ever seen. I grabbed a sample and slowly opened up the cracked outer shell and popped it into my mouth. Its sweetness being outrageously reverse-proportioned to its smallness, my mind screamed "so good!"


So here it is folks, a simple pleasure of exiting summer and plunging into autumn.