We all enjoy a good smell: vanilla, fresh rain, the smell of a baseball glove. Smell is a memory trigger–an errant scent you find out in the public can suddenly zap you back to your second grade classroom, the smell of your teacher’s perfume seemingly reaching out from across time and space, grabbing you and drawing you back into your days of recess and learning cursive.

Smells can also be a gateway to hell. Who among us hasn’t come across something horrid and foul? A bad smell can lead to a bad day. A good smell can lead to–appropriately enough–a good day. Yankee Candle knows this. Yankee Candle knows the power of a good smell, though they are more apt to label it a “scent” to appeal to our high-end, metropolitan-aspiring sense of self.

All the bullshit aside, here’s 50 smells that deserve to be Yankee Candles. Maybe some already exist, but I’m going to venture out on a limb and figure at least some do not.

1. Burning Leaves
2. Pizza Sauce
3. Pencil Shavings
4. Tide Laundry Detergent
5. Fried Apples
6. Carnival Cotton Candy
7. A freshly mowed lawn
8. S’mores
9. Salt Water Taffy
10. French Fries
11. Fried Chicken
12. Exploded Firecrackers
13. Bubblegum
14. Old Leather
15. Antique books
16. Chalkboard erasers
17. Carpet Stores
18. New car floor mats
19. Fresh Pretzels
20. BBQ Pork
21. Donuts
22. Tree Bark
23. Ozone
24. Pool Chlorine
25. Sunblock
26. Charcoal
27. Damp Morning Air
28. Popcorn
29. Roasted Pumpkin Seeds
30. Clean towels
31. Hospitals
32. Cedar Mulch
33. Hot Asphalt
34. Coffee
35. Ground up Tires
36. Gasoline
37. Construction Paper
38. Halloween Masks
39. A Snickers Bar
40. Chili Powder
41. Dirt
42. Sawdust
43. Vinyl Seats
44. Jellybeans
45. Pancakes
46. Newspaper
47. Acrylic Paint
48. Creeks and Ponds
49. Typewriter Ribbons
50. The Inside of a walk-in freezer

You’ll notice a lot of food items here. I won’t apologize for that–I like food! Taste and smell are intertwined in our day-to-day lives, and it takes the fun out of the exercise to try and separate one from the other.

The goal of this site is to encourage growth, development, and maturity of my writing skills. And possibly some entertainment for whatever audience this may attract.

This site will not be entirely prompt-focused. I can’t promise entirely what that will evolve into, but there will be occasional works that sprang from my own dusky psyche rather than the pages of a book.

There won’t be any set schedule, though the goal is as much as possible.

Here we go.