The Fox Hunt - Diary of a Beginner

It's astonishing. I've spent 50 years focused on how things sound and forfeiting the intoxication of how things smell.

Not that I haven't noticed fragrance. No memory is complete without a fragrance. Time has depth and weight, and with that comes texture, color and fragrance.

My childhood smells like the ocean, my mother's Coppertone tanning lotion slathered in every pore of all bodies within range. It smells like rain and bullfrogs and cheap art supplies and always, always blueberries and cornbread.

My middle years smell like steel and carnivals. They smells like ice and sawdust. They smell like swindlers and comics. They smell like night in prettiest city in the world.

Later years smell like forgotten thoughts and clean linens, and wires - electricity pulsing past girls wearing blue jeans and no shoes. They smell like the highway when it snows and the windows are down. Time smells sweet and thick and quiet like the fog that surrounds a dream.

And now time, once again, smell like the ocean. Only better. More tart and ripe and more like the sky where it meets the edge of the cranberry bog. Where the coyotes howl. Most nights. While we sleep and unfold.