My hands smell like living dirt after a misty, thirty minute rainstorm; like onions that took too long to dice with your cheap paring knife so you started crying but couldn't stop chopping because... well, onions are delicious; like a new smell never known before this night: the water stored in clusiaceae plants that gushes out like blood from a cut when you squeeze the leaf like you squeeze your fingers; and like actual blood--not metaphorical blood but actual blood--my blood, which always smells a little different, but which today smells more coppery than usual, with green and blue, the colors of copper in its old age, slipping into the personality behind the fragrance that has leached into, and won't leave, my hands.
They smell like life. More importantly, they smell like a life I'd love to live, and a life I am lucky enough to be currently living. I do not know how long I can keep this up, this way of living, with its gardening, cooking, cleaning, messing around, goofing off, but the amazing thing about scents--whether they be pleasant or disgusting--is that they are one of the hardest things to forget.
In the future, when I smell like dinner and plants and copper and rain, I will remember this day--a fairly benign and unexceptional one--and smile because, despite its uneventfulness, it was one of the better days in my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment