🚗 A parent's cigarettes stay behind as a smell
A child's memory comes back through smell before words. The sight of a parent trying to quit stays in the house too.
Sometimes, long into adulthood, the smell of your childhood comes back without warning.
You sit in the seat of an old car and remember the air of a night from decades ago. If there's tobacco in that smell, your parent's profile surfaces along with it. A child's memory can return through smell before it returns through words.
To the parent, it was just the usual cigarette.
To the child, it was the scenery of home. Where the parent smoked, their face as they exhaled, the weight of the air in the room. Those things work their way into the memory of a family. Tobacco stays not only in health effects but in the sense that "home was a place that smelled like this."