It's Sunday morning and I'm craving donuts yet again.

I keep a texture journal, in a black and white woven journal my brother Pete gave me for Christmas a couple years back. It's where I practice sensory description, using all of the senses to their full capacity. In it is stuff like:

Chicken left 3 days in crockpot. Felt like: Old fish, liquefied and mixed with mud, poured right into my lungs.

A kid who ordered a cappuccino. Colors that stood out: Dark, polished brown eyes. Actually, they were black-eaten brown. Eyelashes a thick fringe around curved eyelids.
Looked like: Polished glass marbles, with something alive inside of them.

Today, after waking up at 7 and reading from Description and Setting about sensory description by Ron Rozelle, then beginning the preliminary peruse of what I wrote yesterday (making small edits is so fun just after waking), I was craving a maple bar. We had no breakfast food to speak of (cardboard pizzas don't count), so I nipped off to the store to get a donut for me, and sausage and eggs for Jeremy. The donut was very good--in fact, I have another waiting for me when I finish reporting to you my excitement about the first. But because that's a dumb way to let you in on how much I enjoyed the pastry in question:

The first bite into a fresh donut. Felt like: Spongy, paper thin crust, miniscule chocolate icing. A big fat belly of donut in my hand. It expands toward the center as my teeth sink into it, bunching into itself as if trying to stay inflated. Chocolate icing smears the back of my teeth.
Tastes like buttery fried dough, seeping tasty fat from every sponge hole. Yum.
Reminds me of: Springtime chore days, when Nanny and Pop would bring an Albertson's dozen over: Maple bars, chocolate glazed, cream-filled, sticky raspberry-filled bars, bear claws. We ate them listening to Odyssey, watching dad get the mower ready through the front window, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans. The Vega sat baking in the sun, which glared from arching blueness overhead, brushed with whisps of clouds and trails of jet vapors. I was always happy that there were plenty of maple bars. We washed them down with cold millk and trooped outside in our faded neon shorts and worn tennies, bickering happily.

I'm learning to pay attention to not only sensory description, but sensory reaction. Tastes and smells transport us suddenly in memory, and we realize the depth of our own character before moving on. The same applies to fictional characters: Sensory perception evokes a response. Find the response, learn from it. Eat more donuts.