The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts

Since the romance of my working life is no doubt of great interest to my reader(s), I will let you in on this secret: it is more challenging to define "waterfall" (for an audience that may include both middle schoolers and adult English learners and without using the words "water" or "fall") when you are experiencing brain fog than when you are not.

And now it's later and I've been laboring on "doughnut," which has made me hungry for circles of fried dough and also brought me to this extraordinary historical information about how the Civil War, doughnuts, and the state of Maine converged:


The ladies of Augusta, Me [Maine], distributed over fifty bushels of doughnuts to the Third Volunteer regiment of Maine, previous to their departure for the seat of war in 1861. A procession of ladies, headed by music, passed between double lines of troops, who presented arms, and were afterwards drawn up in hollow square to receive the welcome dough-nation. 

Never before was seen such an aggregate of doughnuts since the war began. The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts. Every breeze sighed doughnuts – everybody talked doughnuts. The display of doughnuts beggared description. There was the molasses doughnut and the sugar doughnut – the long doughnut and the square doughnut – the rectangle doughnut and the triangular doughnut – the single twisted doughnut and the double twisted doughnut – the “light riz” doughnut and third kneaded doughnut – the straight solid doughnut and the circular doughnut, with a hole in the center. There were doughnuts of all imaginary kinds, qualities, shapes, and dimensions. It was emphatically a feast of doughnuts, if not a flow of the soul.

All I want in this world is a doughnut banjo picnic.