Ooo Ooo That Smell

My smell memory is extremely powerful. More than touch, image, sound, smells call up moments, places, moments in those places, more forcefully than any other sense.

Now and then I get a whiff of some kind of sagey/butterscotch smell I associate with the hills in El Granada, CA and it drives me crazy. I have to stop where I am and wander around rubbing leaves then smelling my fingers trying to indentify the source. And nothing makes my heart pound like ocean/beach smell. The Great Lakes have always been a way to cheat geography and get the ocean buzz without the travel.


SNIFF

"Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire."
--Roethke, The Rose

*
The back room in my Grandma's house held years of junk. It was basement level. After rain the floor flooded & became greased with mud. I always liked having an indoor room with a mud floor. There were two bird cages, the perches coated with droppings hard as old paint. Honed flints were pinned to the thin, brass-colored bars. Beneath the cages, stacks of spoiled magazines, each binding furred with white fuzz. The back room: muddy & rank as frogs in a jar on a hot day. I swear it was sinking.

*
Ours was a centennial farm & the barn carried every year of its history. The gray wood stale to the fiber, the main floor carpeted with chaff fine as grain & hundred year old corn-cobs shrunken to cigar-size. Dark inside. The barn's breath seemed scented with old dung, pig & rabbit, gone earthy & hardened beneath the chaff. Many times I just stood inside, breathing.

*
My mother's pink hands after canning; the faint, soapiness of unscented candles.