small damp list

i know it's the brass because the metal smell sharpens about an hour before a real storm and goes flat again the next morning. you can put your face quite close to it. nobody minds. the mailbox does not mind. the mailbox has been there since before i could read.

it smells like the lake in 1992. and the lake in 1992 smelled like rain. and the rain in 1992 smelled, somehow, like my grandfather, who was alive then, and who is the reason the coat is still on the shelf and not on the donate pile, despite many sensible suggestions from many sensible people.

glue. paper. some quiet chemical thing. the memory of a rain that has not been rain in many years. some of the stamps in my drawer have outlived their own postage rate, twice, and still hold the smell like a secret.

this is the smell of somebody else's pantry, briefly inside your house. you cannot save it. you cannot bottle it. i have tried, with limited success and several leaks.

the laundromat smells like fabric softener and the parking lot smells like rain on warm pavement and they meet exactly at the front mat. i have stood on that mat for longer than is polite, holding a hamper, pretending to look for my keys.

a green smell. a wet smell. it is, exactly, the smell of the small glass bottle of cider vinegar that fell off the top of the fridge in 2007 and broke open on the linoleum. how a leaf and a vinegar can share a smell is one of the small good mysteries of the kitchen.

wood and rust and the faint print of one thousand cats who have leaned against it. when the rain starts, the screen door announces it before the sky does. the porch knows first.

technically not rain at all. technically the smell of stone exhaling. but if you ask anyone who has stood barefoot on a driveway in august at six p.m., they will tell you it is rain, and they will be right enough.

chlorine, leaves, the soft chemical insistence of suburban summer ending. the smell knows it's over. it is being polite about it.

i don't know how it does this. she takes it out on the first cold tuesday in october and the entire reference desk smells like a particular forest in vermont that i have never been to. she does not seem to notice. she is busy renewing a stack of cookbooks for someone named loretta.

cold and quick and a little bit alarming. there is, briefly, a small ecology there, and the smell is the smell of being interrupted. you should put the stone back. you should always put the stone back.

i have not been in that house since 2003. i can still tell you what the door smelled like at the bottom of the staircase. it smelled like rain that had thought about it for a long time. it smelled like the inside of a wet glove.

especially in a kitchen with the window open, and especially when the rain has just started. there's a particular hollow note that the cardboard adds. i have no scientific explanation. i suspect there is none. i suspect this is fine.

not all hair. a specific kind. the kind that has been outside for forty minutes without trying to stay dry. if you are lucky, this person hugs you when they get back inside.

see also: 001. brass remembers rain longer than rain does.

at four in the afternoon, in november, after a rain. the leaves give up. the stones get a little darker. it is, against your expectations, a very gentle place. i have eaten a sandwich on the bench near the willow more times than i would say out loud.

nobody buys these anymore, but my upstairs neighbor still does, and forgets them, and the corner of his porch where they pile up has become a small reliable shrine to the smell of paper remembering weather.

tin notes, plant notes, and that one specific note that is the smell of rust deciding what it wants to be when it grows up.

i have a tin lunchbox from 1989 that smells, very faintly, like a thunderstorm. nothing in the lunchbox has ever been thunderstorm-adjacent. this is one of the small unsolved cases of my apartment.

after a walk. after a market. after sitting on a bench while the sky made up its mind. the hat collects the smell more reliably than the head does. the hat is, in this way, the better journal.

this entry is here only because i would feel wrong leaving it out. the dog is named bramble. she belongs to my downstairs neighbor. she has, in my opinion, the second-best nose on the block. (i will not say whose is first.)

before the thunder. before anything. there is a smell that lives only there. i have tried to describe it for nine years. the best i have done is: it smells like the room your grandmother put you in for your nap.