The Imagery Of Smells

DeNeen Brown on the smell of memories: The smell of summer and dying marigolds, and mosquito spray and cut grass. The smell of melting tar and telephone poles and Chinese kitchens exhaling their morning breath into city alleys already filled with the smell of urine and bold rats.

The smell of bus fumes, and fireflies flickering into good movies at drive-in theaters. The smell of juice dripping from black cherries falling onto white summer dresses, and you sitting on the front porch spitting out watermelon seeds because if you swallowed them, you thought the seeds would grow in your stomach and then you would have a baby.

The smell of sweat and those twins — Polly and Ester — peeling their behinds from hot leather car seats. The smell of rosebushes in need of water. The smell of the water from a warm hose mixed with a faint smell of rainwater. The smell of someone spraying you with that hose in the heat of summers past because neither your house nor any of the houses in your neighborhood had a pool.

The smell of hot ovens and peach cobbler and sleeping late and fadeless memories.