Another reason why I love my wife

Okay, it's a quarter to nine, none of my papers are graded, and I have an observation third period tomorrow (and a pre-observation meeting with the Vice Principal at 7:30 in the morning). Katrina is downstairs, watching "Mona Lisa Smile." A few moments ago, I heard her pause the DVD, bang around in the kitchen cupboards for a few minutes, and then I heard a sound like pebbles being poured into a metal cup, then a mechanical whirring - a sound I hadn't heard in many years, and couldn't place right away.
Then it came to me. It's said that our sense of smell is most closely connected to our memory, and I believe it's true. The smell of hot-air popped popcorn made its way up here to the loft, and I was instantly transported back to 1983. My parents had bought me the same popcorn popper for Christmas a few months earlier, and it was my pride and joy. Dad had labeled the box (as he did everything) "XMAS-82" (so we would remember when it was bought, I guess).
I don't have the original popper anymore. It was let go, oh, I guess when I made my move to Washington in 1995. I found its twin in a garage sale or at Goodwill one time, and snatched it right up, and that's what is whirring away down in my kitchen right now, bringing back memories of a time before evaluations, house payments, and when the only computer I had was a Commodore Vic-20. (Still have that, by the way - one of the "million things" Gary Rodebaugh declared I owned as I was packing that September day in '95).
But the smell of that air-popped corn - so much more, I don't know, organic than the irradiated microwave crap we all eat all the time now, has managed to fill me with a sweet sense of nostalgia tonight, and made the tasks I have ahead of me (and the late night that they will fill) much easier to bear.