The smell of a hundred different dinners....

I have two routes home at the end of the day. One takes the main drag. I dodge the traffic, keep my eye out for doors and jaywalkers, keep my head down, and pedal. I get home quickly, but that's about it. It's a habit. Routine. Keeps me active, and it's fun to be on the bike, but that's about it.

The other route I take goes through back streets -- through the neighborhoods. It calmer, quieter, but it takes longer. I don't have a lot of free time these days, so I don't always I take this route home after work. But I did tonight, and I'm glad I did. As I pedaled this way at a more leisurely pace than is typical for me, I breathed in the tantalizing scents of a hundred different dinners being cooked in a hundred different kitchens, and I started to smile.

In one neighborhood, it's the smells of East Africa - curry and greens. In another, it's Mexican food - frijoles simmering in the pot. Hamburgers on the grill, pizzas in the oven, rice pilaf on the stove... I got to smell it all. All those people making all that food, not knowing that some of those aromatic molecules would crash their crazy, chaotic paths through the atmosphere to find their way to my olfactory glands as I cruised by with my fluorescent green shirt and blinky lights ablaze in the last rays of the setting sun.

And when I finally did get home, tummy rumbling, I sat down to eat my own dinner (pork chops and beet salad tonight) with a gusto most will never know. With gusto, and with a sense of deep connection to all my unknown neighbors. Neighbors I may never meet, but who had, unwittingly, shared a tiny piece of their meals with me tonight. It's a connection I get to have because I pedal to and from work, and because I chose to take the long way tonight. It's about as intimate as you can get with total strangers who maybe never even knew you were rolling past, but one which all those people in all those cars will never know because those layers of metal and glass seal them up away from the world. All they get are podcasts and radio DJ's and traffic reports. What I get is to share a hundred different dinners with a hundred different families.

The view at dinner time from the summit of my "neighborhood" bike route. Gorgeous light, and tantalizing smells wafting from the houses below.

This post was original written by me and posted to r/bikecommuting under the title "The smell of many dinners". This version is an edited and extended version of that original post.